


Anatomy of a Shadow

by likeporcelain



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Everyone has a lot of issues, F/M, Horror, Horror/Romance, Jon and Daenerys Are Not Related, Jon and Ramsay Are Foster Brothers, Jon is Mute, Lots of erotic undertones but not a lot of smut, Lots of murder also, Modern Era, No one is a "good guy", Nothing Supernatural, POV First Person, R Plus L Does Not Equal J, Romance, Switches between Jon and Dany's POV, Takes place in the Pacific Northwest - near Seattle, There is smut though, no magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-07 14:51:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 43,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14673413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeporcelain/pseuds/likeporcelain
Summary: While isolating herself at her family's vacation home on the small Pacific Northwestern island of Dragonstone, Daenerys stumbles upon a crime scene which leads her to form an intense bond with a mysterious and possibly dangerous young man who won't speak to her, touch her, or even show her his face. Jon Snow is her shadow on the wall, but is he really protecting her from those who would do her harm, or is he simply leading harm right to her doorstep? Daenerys is the sun in his dark sky, but is she really worth protecting?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First off, this is a completed story. There are 9 chapters total with no epilogue. If you followed my last story "A Crack in Everything" (shameless self-promotion: please give it a read if you haven't already!) then you'll know the drill. I'm a super impatient person so I'll probably be updating every other day. Possibly every day depending on what I have going on. Second, this is a Horror/Romance crossover genre story (or Thriller/Romance depending on how you view it). Count this as a writing experiment of mine since I am not used to writing things like this. This story is based off of an original fiction idea I've been thinking about for a long time so if this is well received I may actually write that original story one day. Lastly, PLEASE leave kudos if you enjoy this and PLEASE comment as well. But whether you like this or not, thank you for giving it a shot!

**DAENERYS**

It is raining, which is a good thing. It's much more difficult to follow someone when it's raining, right? Let the water wash away any trace of me – my finger prints, shoe prints, the tire marks from my Jetta as I speed down the highway. No. The rain won't make a difference. I'll have to board the ferry to get to my family's old vacation home. That means buying a ticket, showing my I.D. and – fuck – I'll have to use my credit card because the only cash I have is a couple crumpled up five dollar bills stashed in my glove box. What am I doing? Running away is probably the stupidest thing I could do. Only guilty people run. 

Still, I stand in line and buy the ticket to Dragonstone. It's my family's house after all. It would be only natural that after suffering such a traumatic event as finding my roommate with a knife dug into the center of her chest, lying between the beds in our dorm room that I would feel the need to get away, go someplace quiet to clear my head. That is what I'm really doing. I just need to get away from everyone and get these images out of my head. The detectives will soon figure out that I've left school and it will be easy for them to discover where I've gone. But that's okay, because I'm not trying to hide from them, because I did nothing wrong. Nothing they can prove, I hope.

The moon is up and the rain is still falling when I make it to the house. It's large by normal standards – three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an open main living area with floor to ceiling windows that overlook the sea – but my dad is rich and growing richer by the day, so this home was eventually stamped unworthy of a Targaryen vacation. It's been years since anyone has set foot in this house, as evident by all of the dust and the cold, musty smell I'm bombarded with as soon as I walk in. White linens cover expensive furniture and priceless artwork no one cares about anymore.

Thankfully, my dad has still been paying the bills for this place because the lights turn on when I hit the light switches and the water runs when I turn on the bathtub facet in the master bathroom. I make up the king sized bed while the tub fills with scalding water. The basin is large enough to fit three of me, so I have plenty of time to kill. I find candles and a box of matches under the bathroom sink and arranged them around the tub, light them, then turn out the sconce lighting. I prefer darkness. The tub has jets, but I have no use for them. I prefer quiet too. 

When the water is high, I turn off the facet and step in. Just standing in the center of the tub, the water reaches my knees, so hot that I think my skin will bubble, but I revel in the pain. I want more. Slowly, I lower myself with closed eyes, teeth digging into my bottom lip so hard I can taste blood. 

Blood. 

Blood on the floor, spilling from the chest of my roommate, pooling at either side of her, expanding like round red wings ready to fly her up to heaven, or maybe hell. I hadn't known her very well. Maybe she was bad. As bad as me. No. There is no one as bad, as sick, as me.

Blood under my feet, on my knees where I knelt beside her, checking her pulse. When I had raised my hand to my mouth, I could taste it, colder than I'd expected, sweeter. 

Blood around me, covering me, filling me. I open my eyes and I see all the red. I'm bathing in my roommates blood. Missandei. That was her name, but then again, I didn't really care about her. She hadn't mattered. All that mattered was the blood. 

I submerge myself up to my neck, letting the heat consume me. My hand is between my legs, rubbing the tender, burning flesh, but there's no use. It's not the same. No matter how vivid the memories are, no reverie could recreate the way I felt that night with that taste in my mouth and the sight of the red pools growing in size. 

For a half hour, I try, but just can't cum. I can't even get close. It's been too long. Just three days and I'm already suffering withdrawals. I thought the first time was supposed to linger. I thought I could live off of her death for years. 

When the water turns cold, I pull the plug on the drain and sob until I am left lying in the middle of the tub, hugging my knees to my chest, wondering how many days I will have to myself before everyone realizes what sort of a girl I really am. Daenerys Targaryen. Beautiful, smart, rich. Possessed, deranged, dangerous. 

Evil.

* * * * *

I wake up early the next morning. I'm not usually a morning person, but sleep was hard to come by when I was so convinced that at any moment one of the detectives I'd met the night of Missandei's unfortunate murder would knock on my door and ask me why I had left school, left Seattle, without notifying them. They would be suspicious, and I would eventually crack under their questioning. 

But no one knocked. 

The sun is rising over the trees, casting a shine over the calm ocean water that I watch from the back deck. There are some old Swiss Miss packets in one of the kitchen cupboards and I make myself a mug, but that is about the extent of the food supply here. I will have to go to the grocery store. Use my credit card again, but I suppose that at this point, it hardly matters. My fate is sealed. All I can do now is live a peaceful life for however many days, or hours, I have left.

I change into one of the few outfits I brought with me – just essentials, stuffed into a small gym bag – and tie my long, Targaryen-silver hair up in a messy pony tail. I don't bother with makeup, because impressing people isn't part of my life anymore. I am different now. No longer an over-achieving college junior. No longer the sweet daughter of one of the state's richest businessmen. My entire life is this empty house now, on this scantily populated island. 

There isn't a cloud in the sky as I walk to the market, about a two mile hike, and the air smells fresh from last night's storm. So fresh I wonder for a moment if the rain had worked on me as it had on the air. Am I clean now too? Have all my sins washed away into the sea? Is that why I am walking into town right now and not riding in the back of a police car?

The closest neighbor to my family's house is half a mile down the road. Unless they've moved, it belongs to a retired couple. A retired man and his wife, I should say. She'd never worked a day in her life. He was a finance man. Hedge funds, or investment banking. Maybe both. Is there even a difference? Who knows. Either way, he's a boring old man who has too much money and never smiles despite having everything anyone could ever want. That's probably why he and my father always got along.

Sure enough, as I pass their impressive abode, Mrs. Baratheon is in the front garden. Her eyes widen when they fall to me and I raise my hand in a wave. I am always recognizable from a distance, due to the odd coloring of my hair. Or, I guess I should say, the odd absence of color. Even whiter than my alabaster skin. I stop walking so that she can approach me, smiling wide. 

“My, my. Little Daenerys Targaryen? I haven't seen you since you were. . . How old were you? Fifteen?”

I smile sweetly. It's easy to lie to people who don't suspect anything of me. In a way, I'd been doing that my whole life. Any time I would drift into a gruesome daydream and someone asked “What are you thinking about?” I would smile sweetly and lie. 

“You're looking well, Mrs. Baratheon,” I tell her, even though she really doesn't. Her hair is stringy and her face is wrinkled. Her gardening clothes are noticeably expensive, though, so there's that.

She brushes away my complement, not buying it, but blushes nonetheless. “Is your father and brother here? Gosh, I haven't seen them in ages either.”

“They don't come here much anymore. Viserys is down in California working on some silly nonsense project with his Silicon Valley friends. We don't exactly keep in touch. Dad's simply grown tired of the fog. He's more of a Hawaii man now. It's good to be back here. This was always my favorite place growing up.”

“Mine too! Well, that's why I insisted on moving here full-time. It does mean that Stannis is away from me quite often, but I manage. He's been working again, though only part-time. It's hard for men like him to sit still.”

“My father is the same way. His job is like a third child – his favorite child.”

Mrs. Baratheon claps her hands in front of her. “Where are my manners? Would you like to come in for some coffee? A bagel? Stannis isn't home. He's out of town until tomorrow, so you won't have to sit through any of his boring economics lectures.”

I take a breath, staring down the road while thinking the proposal over. Today more than any other day should be treated as a stop-and-smell-the-roses day, so I accept. “A bagel sounds lovely, but I'll only stay for a bit. I'm actually on my way to the market now, but it's so far and I'm famished.”

“Better fuel up then!” She exclaims, placing her hand on my shoulder and leading me up the path to her home, so lavish it makes mine feel modest. Marble floors cover every square foot of the main living area and a grand stone fireplace stretches up twenty feet to the ceiling. A staircase with a hand-carved banister curves around a crystal chandelier, leading up to a second floor overhang. A five foot tall portrait bordered by a gold frame hangs on the wall opposite the fireplace. Mr. and Mrs. Baratheon posing with their daughter, Shireen, dressed like they are characters in a Dickens novel and standing in what looks to be a drab library.

While Mrs. Baratheon brings a tray of bagels and coffee into the living room, I ask “How is your daughter? She must be a teenager by now.”

“Oh.” Her nose scrunches as she shakes her head. “Yes, yes. She's well. We have her in a boarder academy in the Northeast. She says she hates it there, but she's always been a complainer. It's good for her. I'm hoping that some time spent around other girls will do her some good. Better than hanging around here all the time, getting under toe, that's for sure.”

Nodding once, I find myself feeling odd about the response. There was no warmth in the woman's voice. I'd liked to imagine that if I'd ever have a daughter, I would speak of her warmly. I've never experienced real love or even simple affection for another human, but a child is different. I think I could love a child. But, that doesn't matter anymore either, because I will never have one of those, unless those news articles about how male prison guards treat female inmates is accurate. 

I don't partake in any coffee, but I pick up one half of a toasted sesame seed bagel and smear it with Strawberry jam from a crystal bowl. Mrs. Baratheon takes a seat on the couch, but I remain standing, my eyes catching the shine of something interesting perched on the reclaimed wood mantel above the hearth. 

Resting on a stand made of iron, is a knife – a dagger? – with a gold handle, intricately carved in a flourishing design. The blade is curved and at least a foot in length, clean and sharp. I gravitate toward it, my hand raising, fingers erecting to brush the smooth steel. It's beautiful, not just in appearance, but in utility, in how much damage it could do with just one swift thrust, one quick slice. 

“Valyrian steel,” Mrs. Baratheon's voice rings from behind me, dripping with indifference like the daggers presence bores her. I feel offended and briefly wonder if she'd let me have it if I asked. Then again, one swift thrust, one quick slice, and I could simply take it. “Stannis brought it home with him a year ago. Some antique ceremonial weapon from one of those Eastern barbarian cultures. Personally, I think it's gaudy and dangerous, but my husband loves the thing, and I'm sure it cost him a pretty penny. I figure I'll sell it once the cigars catch up with him.”

Fingertips sliding down the flat steel surface to the golden handle, I wish to pick it up, just to see how heavy it is. It has to be heavier than the hunting knife I'd thieved from a bedroom in the frat house I'd attended a party at a week before my roommate was murdered. I'd been drawn to it the same way I am drawn to this Valyrian steel dagger, but to compare the two would be like comparing my Jetta to my father's new Maserati.

“Daenerys?” 

My eyes close and behind my eyelids, I see red.

“Daenerys?” 

Mrs. Baratheon's hand lands on my shoulder and my eyes snap open as I jump, pulling my hand away from the dagger. 

“I'm sorry,” I say quickly. 

With a smile, she says “No need to apologize. That thing is spooky as heck. Gives me a good fright nearly every day.”

While I finish my bagel, I sit with my back to the dagger and try to focus on Mrs. Baratheon's words rather than the pulsing of her jugular vein, prominent due to her lithe frame, and as soon as I've had my fill, I thank her for her hospitality and leave, but not before agreeing to come over for dinner tomorrow night. “Stannis would love to catch up with you,” Mrs. Baratheon had insisted. I don't want to come over, but I hadn't prepared an excuse to get out of it, and I figure there is a decent chance I'll already be in handcuffs by dinner time tomorrow anyway.

At the market, I optimistically purchase a weeks worth of pre-made salads, stove-top dinners and ingredients for sandwiches, quesadillas and spaghetti, along with a carton of eggs. As the cashier checks me out and bags my groceries – I'd sprung for a couple of one-dollar reusable bags because, fuck it – I turn my eyes up to the TV mounted to the wall. Seattle news. A murder, according to the headline and my heart races for a moment thinking they are talking about Missandei's murder. I half expect my photo to pop up with “Wanted for Questioning” captioned below. However, as I read the subtitles, I learn they are speaking of a different murder, a more important murder, because the man who has died was a politician. One of those conspiracy theorist-types who didn't have a shot at winning, but whose campaign was really just a way to bolster a certain subset of humans who thought they deserved more rights than anyone else simply for being white and stupid. 

_“The sketch seen on your screen now is that of a man police suspect is connected to the crime. He was seen by a neighbor leaving the home of the victim the night of the murder. If you have any information as to the identity or whereabouts of this man, please contact the Seattle police department immediately.”_

I squint my eyes at the sketch, wondering if he is someone I know, but even if I did know him, it's not as if I'm going to contact the police about it. I am trying to avoid a murder investigation, not insert myself into a new one. But, I do not recognize the man at all. His hair is cut short to the scalp without any style, his face is covered in stubble not long enough to be considered an actual beard, his lips are thin and his cheeks look dirty, though that is probably just sloppy shading on the sketch artist's part. 

_“This incident follows just one day after the suspicious slaying of a nineteen year old King's Landing University student. So far, police say they have found no connection between these two murders, but have yet to rule this out as a possibility.”_

“Miss?” asked the young, pimply cashier. “That'll be forty-seven fifty.”

I turned away from the TV, offer her a smile and my credit card.

Another murder. And one that is much higher in profile to mine – I mean, to my roommate's. This could only be good news, right? Scum bag or not, the assassination of a political figure will always take precedent over the stabbing of a marginally popular coed, right? 

When my card is returned to me, I take my bags with another smile, but this time it is genuine. Maybe I'll have more time left than I'd thought.

* * * * *

**JON**

It's cold in this room. Damp. There's a leak somewhere. I hear it drip at night, but I have yet to find it's source. I don't like it here in the North where it's cold and wet and drippy. I feel like it's been years since I've felt the sun on my face. Maybe it has been years. The room is cold and so am I, even in my corduroy pants, sweater, gloves and my mask. Everything black. 

“Are you a fucking moron?! Like, an actual fucking moron?!” shouts Theon Greyjoy. He's loud. Always loud. I don't like him because he's loud. It makes it difficult to hear other things, more important things, like if someone is walking up behind me or if a gun is being drawn from a holster. He's yelling at the kid because of something he saw on the news, but I've learned that most of what Theon says isn't worth listening to so I focus on listening through him, to the sound of the kid rubbing his hands anxiously across his jeans.

“I'm sorry! I forgot to put my mask on before going back outside, but it was three in the morning! How was I supposed to know some fat old man would be walking his dog at three in the morning!” the kid replies. 

Gendry isn't really a kid. He's around the same age as the rest of us, but he's younger in spirit I guess. It isn't an insult that I think of him as a kid. I wish I could be a kid again. Change something. Go down a different path. One different than my brother's. It's too late now, though. I am who I am now. Only twenty-one but already an old dog unable to learn any new tricks, like being a normal person who goes outside during the day instead of sitting in a cold, damp, drippy basement until the sun is gone. 

The sun. What does she look like again?

“You're not! You're supposed to know never to take your fucking mask off!” Theon retorts, clenching his fists in the fabric of Gendry's t-shirt. “Even if that mother fucker hadn't fucking seen you – There's probably fucking hair and skin and your fucking boogers all over that son of a bitch's house now! You're in the fucking system! I swear to God, if they get your finger prints I'm going to fucking --”

“I didn't take off my gloves, man!” The kid's hands are up like he's about to be arrested. “And my mask was only off for a minute! They're not going to find anything!”

Theon releases the kid from his grip, plants one hand on his hip while thrusting his other in my direction, pointing at me. “This fucking psycho doesn't even take his fucking mask off to take a fucking shower and you can't keep yours on long enough to get out of the fucking house of the dude we just fucking killed?!”

Still listening through Theon, I hear the sound of a gun sliding against the leather of a belt. It's coming from behind me. Then footsteps, quick and heavy. In a second, the gun is digging into Theon's temple with Ramsay on the trigger side. 

“I think you owe my brother an apology,” he sneers. I can't see his face, but I know that one corner of his mouth is lifted in a smirk. He wants to shoot Theon. He's wanted to for a long time. He would shoot everyone he meets if he could get away with it. Maybe even me.

Eyes wide with fear, Theon takes a hard swallow and says “Put the gun away. I was just pissed, alright? Let's not over react.” 

“That didn't sound like an apology.” Ramsay turns his head to me and I was right, he's smirking. “That didn't sound like an apology, did it, Jon?”

I don't respond. No words, no shake or nod of my head. It wouldn't matter anyway. Ramsay does what he wants and I don't try to stop him. That's how it's always been. I wonder if he's actually going to pull the trigger this time. It would be a shame, not because I don't want to see Theon die, but because I've always hated guns. Quick, loud, and uncaring. That's Ramsay, though.

Before I can wonder too long, the scene is interrupted by our leader – our boss, I suppose. A boss who pays us not just in money, but also in warm bodies to kill. 

“Put it away,” Roose demands in his dry, bored voice. “We have one more project and then we'll be out of the state. Gendry made a serious error, but it doesn't change our game plan.”

Ramsay complies, sliding the gun back behind him, into the waistband of his pants. He always listens to Roose Bolton. I think he sees the balding, middle-aged man with almost as little personality as me as a father figure. Maybe I should feel happy about that, because Ramsay never had a real father, but I don't feel happy about it because I don't know if I can feel happy about anything anymore.

Sitting in this cold, damp, drippy room of this cold, damp, drippy basement, we go over the mission again. Though he acts like what the kid did is no big deal, Roose doesn't trust him anymore, which makes him not trust any of us anymore, so after we go over the mission, we go over it again, and again. The target is some money man – I don't bother learning names anymore – who helps to launder money for foreign dictators or some such thing. Roose always makes sure to tell us all the reasons why a person is better off dead, but it never really matters. He could tell us the target is a teenage beauty queen with Ivy League ambitions and a spotless record and we would still show up at her house and take care of business. 

Any murderer who claims to have a code, is a liar. I surely don't have a code, unless hating guns constitutes a code, but then again, I'm not a murderer. Not in the literal sense of the term anyway. I've never killed anyone. Not one person. Ever. I wouldn't be able to, and sometimes I feel weak because of it. Even the kid can kill, but I can't. I watch. I watch and then, when the job is done, I clean. That's why Roose isn't worried about Gendry's fingerprints or hair being found. It's because I cleaned. It's my job. It's what I'm good at. I listen, I watch, I clean. And I never take off the mask.

Well. . . not never. Theon was wrong. I do take it off to shower, because showers are a safe place when the bathroom door is locked. There's a bathroom in this basement we've been calling home for the past week. It's small and there is mold growing in the corner behind the sink that I still haven't fully eradicated. I wait until everyone else is asleep and then I go in, lock the door, and turn the water in the shower stall on. Until the shower heats up, the bathroom is even colder than the rest of the basement and as I disrobe, my skin tightens and stings and twitches in it's yearning for shelter. 

There is a mirror above the sink, rusted on the edges and speckled with toothpaste and whatever else. I look at myself when my clothes are off and in a pile on the floor. I stare at my chest and stomach. My muscles are made more prominent by the fact that I haven't eaten in a day. Food is hard to come by while we are on missions because the need to lay low is even greater. Across my chest and my stomach are long, jagged, discolored scars. Every night I look at them and think back to the day I acquired them. On my knees in a filthy alleyway.

The mask is always last to come off. I have to prepare myself every time. The pain I feel without it's warm cloth covering my head and neck and face is real. I've grown so accustomed to always having my breathing partially compromised by the fabric over my mouth that I can no longer inhale normally without it. I take short, shallow breaths through my teeth. My eyes have grown so used to seeing through the fabric as well that light burns my eyes now without it. I have to unscrew two of the three bulbs mounted in an industrial light fixture above the mirror just to stand it.

When the mask is off, I look at my face, but never for too long. I'm pale, a ghost of a man, and there are scars there too, making me look older than I am, making me look ugly. I've grown a short beard, thinking it would detract from the scars, but I am still hideous. My dark hair is long too, and greasy from always being cocooned. 

Steam envelops me now and my image blurs in the fog, relieving me of my own haunting reflection.


	2. Chapter 2

**DAENERYS**

I had spent most of yesterday reacquainting myself with my family's three acres of land here on Dragonstone. I took the trail through the trees, down to the beach and collected shells. It was too cold for a swim, even with the sun up, but I took off my boots and sunk my feet into the wet sand while I paced the beach, allowing the water to swoop up to my ankles a few times. By nightfall, I still hadn't received any uniformed visitors, but my cell had rung a couple times from an unknown number. My voicemail wasn't set up and I certainly didn't call the number back so I still wasn't sure if it was a detective or not. I also had a few texts from my dad by the time I went to bed, responding to my casual notification that I'd left school and would be staying on Dragonstone – because of the trauma of course. He didn't care. The only thing he cared about was the house. 

_“Always lock up when you leave and before you go to sleep. If anyone suspicious comes by, don't contact the police. They're useless on that island. Call this number instead.”_

As if I would actually call the police. The number he sent me looked familiar, probably belonging to one of his more thug-like associates, but I wasn't in the mood to care.

Today, I spend most of the day perched on a stool at the kitchen island, sketching. It's my hobby, I suppose, but I've always hated the word hobby. It makes it sound so mundane. I don't do it for fun so much as by necessity. It clears my mind. Hours and hours go by without me even noticing the change in light from day to night. Today, I sketch Missandei, but not her portrait, unless body parts minus the head can still be considered a portrait – I'm not an art major or anything. I draw her hand, resting on the floor of our dorm room, her slender fingers curled like she's holding an invisible stress ball. Her hand is resting in a puddle of blood, but I haven't yet shaded in the red. That comes last.

Then, there's a knock on my door and my hand seizes at the sound of a fist on wood, creating an awkward mark on Missandei's index fingernail. I think this is it. They've come to arrest me. I wonder if they'll let me take my sketch with me so I might finish it at the station. I always hate to leave a project unfinished. 

Straightening my sweater and running my fingers through my hair, I go to the door and open it, calm and accepting of my fate. It was worth it, I think, to finally do the thing I was built for.

Sure enough, I see a familiar man standing tall on my porch, chestnut hair pushed back with a bit too much gel, but he is objectively attractive and my smile at him reflects that. Attractive men always need attractive women to smile at them.

“Miss Targaryen,” he greets me with a polite nod of his head. A hand comes out from behind his back to show me his detective badge before sliding it into his jacket's inner breast pocket. “I've been trying to reach you. Your father told me you were here.”

And I'd been worried about a paper trail. I shake my head at my stupidity, but play it off as apologetic.

“I'm sorry, Detective. . ?”

“Naharis.”

“I'm sorry, Detective Naharis. I get terrible cell reception up here, but I really should have contacted you before I left. That's my fault. I wasn't thinking. It's been difficult, you know. Since. . .” I trail off and avert my eyes downward, pretending to need a moment to compose myself. “Oh jeez. Where are my manners? Please, come in.”

I step aside and allow Detective Naharis to enter my home, then close the door behind us. He has both his hands behind his back as he wanders slowly through the main room, looking around the place like he wants to make me an offer. 

“All I have is water and hot chocolate,” I tell him. 

“Oh, I'm fine. Thanks, though. I just wanted to come by and see how you're doing. You were very distraught the other night, understandably so. After seeing what you saw, I can imagine you'd be struggling.” 

Hugging my arms around myself, I take a long, uneven inhale. It wasn't even a lie when I answered “Yes. Every time I close my eyes I see it all over again. It was too difficult to be around other people. Coming up here was sort of a spontaneous decision. I thought that if one more person asked me about what happened I would lose my mind.”

I move to sit on one of the leather sofas and motion for Detective Naharis to join me. He sits at an angle to face me.

“I saw on the news that there was another murder,” I say. “I guess this is just how the world is now. Or maybe it's always been this way and I'm only now realizing it.”

“Yeah, unfortunately the mayoral candidate's death has sucked much of the department's resources, but I assure you that I'm working vigilantly to get your friend's case closed.”

Friend? She wasn't really my friend. An acquaintance I guess, but I simply nod solemnly. 

“I wanted to ask you a couple of clarifying questions about your statement, if you don't mind.” He takes a notepad from the same inner pocket he'd stashed his badge away in. A short pen is hooked to the cover and he takes it off, clicking it once with his thumb while flipping the notepad open. “You said that when you found Missandei she was already dead?”

“Yes. I mean, her eyes were shut but I checked her pulse and felt nothing.”

“And you didn't see anyone else in the building when you were walking up to your room?”

“No one. I was listening to my iPod, though. Not really paying attention. Aren't there cameras in the halls of those dorms? Can't you look at the footage?”

His head shakes, sighing with an exhale through his nose. “Your dorm is one of the older ones on campus and unfortunately the electrical system is unreliable. The cameras had been down for about a week prior to your friend's death.”

“Shit,” I say under my breath. I have to force the word out, but make it seem like it just slipped. Out of habit, I never use bad language in front of my elders and this man looks to be well into his thirties. Of course, I had already known the cameras weren't working. I may have been new to the game, but I'm not an idiot. “I guess that explains why the vending machines are almost always out of order.”

“I've spoken with Missandei's boyfriend at length, but is there anyone else you can think of who she was close to, who may have had a key to the building or your room?”

I chew my bottom lip, allowing some of my nervous energy to show through. “Actually, the truth is, I never really knew much about her. It's difficult for me to make friends because I'm such a workaholic when it comes to school. Plus, no one is ever very eager to hang out with Aerys Targaryen's daughter – I'm sure you know his reputation isn't exactly squeaky clean. I never got around to meeting her other friends, aside from her boyfriend, and she never mentioned anyone specific. I'm sorry. I'm just. . .” I raise my hand to rub my forehead. “I'm just not very much help, am I?”

“You're doing fine, Miss Targaryen.”

The secondary interview goes on like that for a few more minutes. They are mostly questions I'd already answered the night I called the police to tell them my roommate was dead. I pretend much better than I thought I could, but I don't relax until Detective Naharis is back in his police issued sedan, turning out of my driveway. 

I fall to my knees in the foyer, resting my hands on the closed front door, breathing purposefully like the air is new to my lungs. 

Safe. At least for another day. 

At dusk, I have to turn the kitchen light on to finish my sketch. I run a red pencil at an angle across the page, filling in where the blood should be. This would look so much better in paint, but I'm not good with paints and don't have any anyway. 

At six o'clock, I ready myself for dinner with the Baratheon's. 

* * * * *

I don't get home until ten and I'm a little tipsy from all the expensive wine Stannis Baratheon had me trying all night even though I'm almost a full year shy of twenty-one. He'd been trying to impress my father through me, thinking I would actually relay my experience at their home with him. I won't. 

I wake up on the sofa. The lights are on and so are my shoes. I don't know what time it is and I can't find my phone. Eventually, I read from the clock on the microwave that it's almost midnight. I spend some time searching around the room for my phone before deciding I must have left it at the Baratheons' place. I'm pissed at myself because I don't want to go over there tomorrow and endure another tedious conversation with Mrs. Baratheon before being forced into an even more tedious conversation with Mr. Baratheon. If I go retrieve it now, so late at night, I can apologize quickly for their inconvenience and head straight back home. I don't want to wake them up, though. I'll just walk over and if the lights are still on, I'll knock on the door. If not, I'll resign myself to having to make another trip in the morning. 

Bundled in a hoodie lined with sheep's wool, I trek down the road, enjoying the slight drizzle of rain, but hoping it doesn't come down any more than that until after I'm back home. I walk fast just in case, which helps me keep warm. 

Sure enough, when I reach the Baratheon residence, the first floor lights are still on. Maybe I brought out the youth in my neighbors and they were staying up late listening to records and finishing off those wine bottles. Hopefully they aren't having sex. I would rather die than see that.

I notice that the front door is slightly ajar when I ascend the porch steps. That's always awkward. Do I walk right in or do I push the door open and announce my presence? I decide to do both. Holding the door handle with one hand, I knock on the surface with my other. After a few seconds, I push in the door.

“Hello?! It's Daenerys again! I think I left --”

My voice box freezes along with my feet just within the threshold of the front door. My heart beat jumps and jumps like someone is repeatedly punching my chest. My eyes fill with red. 

Blood.

Not big, seeping pools of blood, but spatters of blood like swinging a paintbrush in front of a canvas. The marble floors are dotted in the stuff, the fireplace speckled with it, the blue sofas are covered in little red spots. And between the sofas, in front of the hearth, are two bodies. Mr. and Mrs. Baratheon. Both face down, their limbs lying at awkward angles. Mrs. Baratheon is missing a shoe and half of Mr. Baratheon's head is colored a black-ish red. 

Red. 

Blood. 

I close my eyes. I squeeze them shut, willing the images to go away, but when I open them back up, the scene before me does not change. Did I do this? No, I couldn't have. I would remember if I had. Every second of the act would be seared into my memory along with Missandei's demise, but I have no recollection of this. Besides, these bodies have been bludgeoned. So harsh and angry. No, I wouldn't have done this.

Gravitating toward the blood, my feet move on their own accord. My mind is elsewhere. Swimming. My body aches, but it's a good pain, like when you get home from a run and you just feel stronger, more powerful. I'm on my knees beside Mrs. Baratheon. Her injuries aren't noticeable from her back side and I long to view the damage done. Who did this? Are they still here? Am I next?

As my eyes lift to view my surroundings, my hand lays to rest on Mrs. Baratheon's shoulder blade. Just then, though, I am struck back to focus on the dead woman because suddenly, she isn't as dead as I thought she was. 

With a sharp gasp, Mrs. Baratheon's head shoots up from the floor, body rolling onto her back like a dying fish, arm outstretching and fingers curling tight around my wrist like a vine. I see her injury now. Her forehead is dented on the left side, her skin sunken and I wish I could see the fractures in her skull. Her eyes are wide, staring at nothing and her lips open and close like she wants to say something to me but all that comes out of her mouth are mangled moans and gurgles. 

I fall backwards, onto my butt, yanking my hand away from her grasp. I'm startled and scared, but more than that, I'm anxious. Anxious because this presents an opportunity to me, an opportunity to right a wrong. Someone had come into this home and bludgeoned this woman half to death, probably with a hammer judging by the size of the indentation in her head. 

What a waste. 

* * * * *

**JON**

They take turns. It keeps the police from connecting all of the dead bodies, because each of them have a different method. Ramsay always kills with a gun. He likes how it feels to take someone's life away in half a second without ever having to take a step in their direction. The best results with the least amount of effort. Theon likes to watch people suffocate. A rope around your throat, a plastic bag over your face, and if convenient, he'll hold your head under water. It was tiresome just to watch. The opposite of Ramsay. Slow, unpredictable results while exerting maximum energy. Then there's the kid. 

It's Gendry's night and he brought a steel hammer with a long wooden handle. Ramsay and Theon do one of their maniac acts to scare the couple while Gendry psyches himself up. He isn't like the other two. He isn't built to kill. He learned it along the way, though I don't know how or why, but he keeps doing it, just like I keep doing what I do. 

I watch from the second floor. The stairs lead up to an open hallway with a kind of balcony, overlooking the front half of the first floor. Gendry's nights are my favorite. I'm never completely satisfied, but I enjoy it more than I enjoy watching people run out of air, or drop lifelessly to the floor as quick as it takes to snap your fingers. Sometimes, if he hits them just right, they bleed from their ears so much you could go swimming in the amount.

Not this time, though. He's off his game. Probably still thinking about that news report. I wince at the ugly cracking sound as Gendry connects the hammer with the back of the man's skull. The woman shrieks, but only for a moment before another crack to the front of her head silences her. She sways in place a few times before collapsing to the floor beside her husband. The woman wasn't on the list, but that doesn't matter. Get the job done. There is no penalty for overachieving. 

Theon and the kid leave first. Ramsay turns his head up at me, voice muffled by his mask, same as mine. He asks “You good?”

I nod down at him. 

“You remember how to get back when you're done?”

I nod again. 

“You want me to stay?”

I shake my head. He always asks that, but I always shake my head. I like being alone. I can't clean when people are watching. I guess I'm self conscious about it, but I don't know why. 

After he leaves, I go to the second floor bathroom where I put my supplies. A large duffel bag full of cleaning products, most of which I never use, but I like to come prepared. I also have a roll of plastic, duct tape, scissors, and miscellaneous tools. I lay everything out until the bag is empty, needing to make sure it's all accounted for. I like to be able to see everything together rather than continually search through the bag for the next thing I may need. 

I don't know how many minutes have passed, but it couldn't have been very many. The next thing I know, though, I hear something. Very faint but very real. The sound of a door swinging slowly open.

“Hello?! It's Daenerys again! I think I left --”

The voice stops and I know why. I rise to my feet. I don't wear heavy boots like the others. My worn Converse are more practical than thick sole boots because they are quiet. My footsteps barely make a sound as I step out of the bathroom and into the hallway. 

At the balcony now, where I stood to watch the man from the list and his wife die, I look down and my eyes behold the owner of the voice. A girl. My age maybe, but her face is hard to see. Her hair falls like a white waterfall down her back and across her shoulders. She's crouched beside the woman and I'm suddenly afraid because I know she's going to call the police and I'm not prepared for that. 

And then something else I'm not prepared for happens. The wife stirs. Stupid kid didn't even kill her, but I suppose that isn't all his fault. Someone should have checked to make sure. Not me. That's not my job. My job starts after the kill, not before, not during. My heart is racing now. Do I kill the wife now? Will I have to kill this girl as well?

I can't. 

My gloved fingers squeeze the railing in front of me. I close my eyes for just a few seconds and when I open them, the girl is off the floor. She's standing beside the groaning, convulsing woman. She stands still, body relaxed, eyes calm. I even think I see the hint of a smile on her profile. And then she turns and walks, taking slow steps around the blood spatters until she's in front of the fireplace. Her hands lift an elegant dagger from a stand upon the mantle. I'd noticed the weapon as soon as I walked into the house. Shiny and sharp, but we aren't thieves. 

This girl is a thief, though. The dagger is in her hands now. She plays with it, testing it's weight in her hand. She likes it. I think she's going to leave and I'm grateful for that, but she doesn't. Instead, I watch her move back to the wife and step one leg over her. She crouches once more, straddling the woman's hips and my fingers are numb from how tightly I'm squeezing the railing. Sweat percolates down my back and my legs feel cold. She's hovering the dagger above the wife now. The poor old woman has no idea what's happening. She's blind and delirious, hands grasping at air. My lips part and my pants feel tight. The girl lowers the dagger, digging it's sharp point between the wife's breasts. There's a resistance and the girl pushes harder until the shimmering blade is disappearing lower and lower until the hilt is resting on the wife's chest. With one final convulsion, the old woman succumbs. Her body goes limp, relaxing against the marble. 

I'm breathing heavily and when the girl pulls the dagger slowly from her victim's chest, it's covered in thick red blood that dribbles from the tip and stains the woman's cashmere top. I can't remember the last time I felt this way. I'd seen girl's kill before. We used to have a girl working with us. Theon's sister, but she was brutish like her brother and and Ramsay. She wanted to watch the world burn. Everyone deserved to die. Hate. She killed because she hated. This girl, though. She's different. I'm just not sure how yet.

What's her name? She'd said it when she came in the house, didn't she? I wasn't prepared for it, though, so I hadn't retained it into my memory. I hadn't been prepared for any of this. Not her. Not the way she's making me feel. 

She stands over her kill now, holding the dagger at her side, pointed to the floor. I long for a better view of her porcelain face and blush pink lips. Her eyes stare down at the woman lustfully. Not at the woman. At her blood. At the gash in her chest. At her lifelessness. 

I shudder a breath, surprised I'm still able to breathe at all. This girl. Is she real?

Then, her head turns up and she sees me, her blue eyes widening, her fingers releasing the dagger. It clanks to the floor. I'm warm all over. I've never been this warm. Not even in the shower. I can't move. I'm afraid that if I get any closer to her I might burn, but I want so badly to try. 

The sun. I know what she looks like now. 

White hair. Pink lips. Blue eyes. 

But then she's gone. Running out the front door. Away from me. And she hadn't even seen my scars. 

* * * * *

**DAENERYS**

I run. Fast. I didn't even know I could run this fast. I always got straight C's in gym. I run so fast my feet slap against the pavement, spattering water all over my jeans. When I'm home, I slam the front door shut and lock the dead bolt. I move around the house locking every door and drawing every curtain. I'm crying. My face is hot. 

In the master bathroom, I shed my clothes and search them over. There are smears of red on the knees of my jeans. I'll have to burn them just in case. 

I catch my reflection in the wide mirror above the vanity. 

I've done it again. I truly am a monster.

But is it really my fault? She was as good as dead already. There was no coming back from her condition, was there? I did her a favor. Put her out of her misery. That's a thing, right? And she was so peaceful when I'd finished, when I'd slid that blade right through her heart. I could feel the life leaving her body. I felt it surround me and warm me, making my body tingle. I'd wanted to touch myself right there, standing over her, but it wasn't the same. Putting someone out of their misery isn't the same as taking life away. It is like eating an under-cooked steak or wearing jeans with fake pockets. Incomplete. 

And then there was him. 

Who is he?

A man in all black. A man with no face. Watching me. Completely still. Content to let me do whatever I would do. 

Was he real? Was he the one who killed Mr. Baratheon and attempted to kill Mrs. Baratheon? If so, why didn't he kill me?

Maybe he wasn't real. Maybe I dreamed him. Maybe I dreamed all of it. But that doesn't explain the blood on my jeans.

I turn on the shower, too impatient to fill the tub, and when the water is hotter than hot, I crawl into the stall and sit over the drain, letting the water rain down on me like fire.

* * * * *

**JON**

I'm late. Really late. A sliver of sun peaks over the horizon and the sky is quickly turning from black to gray-ish blue. I was supposed to meet the others at an old farm house on the other side of the island hours ago. I'm nervous. I've never been this nervous in my life. I've never felt anything close to what I'm feeling right now. All that fills my mind is her and the sight of her holding that bloody dagger, wet and dripping. My leg shakes as I push down on the accelerator. I need to hurry.

“Where the fuck have you been?!” Theon shouts at me from the crumbling porch of the house we'd been squatting in since early yesterday morning. He looks like he wants to hold my head underwater, but he won't as long as Ramsay has his gun.

I climb out of the van and stand by the door. I don't want to go inside. I don't want to be the disappointment. I used to always be the disappointment and I never want to go back to that. That's why I always do my job, exactly how I'm supposed to do it. Until tonight. 

Ramsay emerges from the house and he looks relieved. He thought I'd abandoned him, but where would I go? 

“Where were you?” he asks, descending the creaking steps. When he reaches me, his hands land on my shoulders, causing me to flinch. He seems concerned, but Ramsay is a good liar. “Did something happen, Jon?”

Hesitantly, I nod.

“Tell me what happened.”

Tell him? Where would I begin? I can't. He can't know about her. He'll say we have to kill her and I can't let that happen. I've felt more alive in the last five hours than I've ever felt. If she were to die, I might just die with her.

In lieu of an explanation, I walk to the back of the van and pull open the hatch. Ramsay follows and when the back is fully open, he peers inside. Lying on the floor, rolled in plastic, are the man from the list and his wife.

“Jesus, brother. What the fuck?” He mutters before piercing me with his incredulous glare. “Why the fuck did you bring them here? When the fuck have we ever moved the bodies? You were supposed to clean the perimeter to make sure the police wouldn't find anything that could trace back to us. That's all. That's your job.”

I nod, because he's right. I guess I was wrong. You can be penalized for overachieving. 

But, I hadn't been overachieving. What I did was unnecessary as it pertains to our jobs. In fact, the girl being there helped us. She hadn't been wearing gloves and she had probably shed her white hair all over the bodies. The police would have immediately gone after her and she would have no idea who we are. All she'd seen of me was my black clothes, black gloves, and black mask. A shadow really, and nothing more.

I couldn't do that to her, though. I couldn't let her get caught. So I cleaned. I cleaned faster and better than I'd ever cleaned before. I cleaned everything. Every single speck of blood. With special equipment, the police could still detect the blood splatters, but to the naked eye, the room is now immaculate. Just as pristine as when we had first set foot in it. And without any bodies, whose to say anything happened to this couple at all? They hadn't been killed. They simply went out of town.

The only problem is, now I have two dead bodies in my trunk.

Roose is still in Seattle, in that basement. We're to lay low in this dilapidated cottage until a boat will take us back across the narrow passage of sea between Dragonstone and the main land. At least I won't have to deal with his wrath. 

“Help us!” Ramsay called out to Theon who begrudgingly complied. When Theon's eyes grew fiery at the contents of the van, Ramsay jabbed a finger against his chest and said “Don't you say a fucking word, Greyjoy.”

The kid came out soon after that and helped me carry the wife into the treeline while Ramsay and Theon carried the man from the list.

“Was this part of the plan?” Gendry asks me quietly after we drop the wife on the ground. Ramsay and Theon had run back to the house to find shovels. 

I simply look at him for a few seconds, then look away. He seems to take it as a no. 

“You know, I don't think I've ever heard you speak,” he says with a small, awkward chuckle. 

It's true. I don't speak. It's not that I can't speak. I can. At least, I think I can. I used to speak when I was a kid, but I don't anymore. At some point I just stopped. No one ever listened to me anyway, so why bother. Now, I don't know. . . I guess I just don't know how to speak anymore. I'm afraid to really. I haven't heard my own voice in so long I'm scared to know what I sound like. Probably as ugly as I look.

“So, who's older? You or Ramsay? Or are you twins?” He chuckles again. “Wouldn't that be crazy? If you took off that mask one day and you had the same exact face as Ramsay. I think I'd shit myself.”

I look at him again and, for the first time in a while, I actually want to answer a question. I want to tell him that Ramsay and I aren't real brothers. Not biologically at least. We're foster brothers, though our foster-home days are long behind us. My eyes prickle with tears as I recall my true brother. Robb. The same age as me, but we aren't twins, just half-brothers. Every day I wonder what he looks like now. I haven't seen him since we were both eight years old and a lot can change between eight and twenty-one. I like to think he's a good person, because if he's a good person, then maybe I would be a good person too if I'd been allowed to stay with him. But that doesn't matter anymore, because I wasn't allowed to stay with him. Our father had died and what woman wants to raise the bastard son of her cheating husband all by herself? So I lost one brother and gained a new one. A bad one. And now I'm bad too.

The sun is up past the horizon by the time we have the bodies buried and I feel as though I've stepped into another dimension. Everything is so clear. So bright and warm. I can hardly stand it. I feel exposed and I need to get inside someplace small and dark and sleep. I'm so tired. 

The others are in similar moods. They'd stayed awake all night fretting over my whereabouts and now looked like walking zombies. The daytime doesn't agree with them either. It makes their eyelids red, their skin sticky, and hair greasy like mine. 

When everyone else is gone inside the house, I go to the van and grab my duffel bag. I take it inside with me. Theon is already snoring on a torn up couch. Gendry is curling into a wide arm chair and I hear Ramsay getting settled in a back room. I go into the bathroom. It's even dirtier than the one in that basement. 

On my knees, I dig through my duffel until my fingers find something sharp. I stare down at the dagger I'd taken from the dead couple's house. I couldn't leave it behind, not after what happened. Not for any practical reason, such as it being used to murder a woman, but because it belongs to the white-haired girl. I'd seen the way she looked at it, the way she used it. It's rightful place is with her.

Something vibrates within my bag and my heart jumps. I set the dagger aside and dip my hand in the bag to retrieve the phone – another thing I'd taken from the house, because I was pretty sure it didn't belong to the man on the list or his wife, judging by the dinosaur-themed case around it. There was a text notification across the lock screen.

_“Hello, Daenerys! Looks like you're due for a dental cleaning! Give us a call to schedule an appointment! Text STOP to end these messages.”_

Daenerys. That's what she had said. “Hello?! It's Daenerys again! I think I left --”

Daenerys.

I turn on the shower and tilt the facet head around until all of the spiders are washed down the drain. The water never gets hot, but that's okay. I've had enough heat for one day already from standing too close to the sun.


	3. Chapter 3

**DAENERYS**

I've slept away most of the day already because I'd been unable to sleep a wink while the moon dominated the sky. I just sat in the over-sized bed of the master bedroom, listening. The gentle patter of the rain against the windows all night made that difficult, but I focused and listened, waiting for some sign that someone was trying to pick one of the locks. It never happened, though, and the morning light made it harder to keep my eyes open. So I let myself sleep. I slept with the sun, and only awoke as it was slowly disappearing behind the Western treeline. 

Now, I stand in the kitchen, consumed by silence. I'm panicking, but not about Mr. and Mrs. Baratheon. I'm panicking about my phone. It's still there, in that house. Probably lying on the dining room table. 

Someone will discover the bodies eventually. There aren't very many people living on this island, and I'm their closest neighbor, but at some point the bodies will stink so severely the mail carrier will faint and when he comes to, he'll be dialing 9-1-1. The police will show up and they'll find the phone of Daenerys Targaryen, their neighbor, and isn't she the same girl who found that King's Landing University student stabbed to death in their dorm room, and doesn't the wound on Mrs. Baratheon look eerily similar to the method in which that student was murdered? They'll ask me what happened that night and I'll say I ate dinner at their house – that's why my DNA is all over the place – and that I left my phone on the table by accident. 

“Why didn't you ever go to retrieve your phone?” they'll ask, and then they'll have me. 

I have to go get my phone now. There's no other way. I'll go now, grab my phone, get the hell out of there, pack up my things, and leave the island. Leave the state. Leave the country. My father is rich. He knows people all over the globe, people who most likely owe him favors. I could be hiding in Belarus by the weeks end. But then I'd have to tell my dad what happened. What I did. Twice. 

After tying my hair up and hiding it under a knit hat and tugging on my boots, I walk to the Baratheon place, but I don't follow the road this time. Cars rarely turn this way, but just in case, I take the trail that leads to the beach, then walk down the shoreline until I'm on the Baratheon property, then take their own trail up to their house. It takes twice as long, but it's actually a very pleasant trip, especially in the dusk when the vanishing sun makes the sky look purple. 

The backdoor is unlocked, just as I'd expected. Locking doors on this island isn't commonplace, and since Mrs. Baratheon died before getting to do a pre-bedtime walk through to check locks, I hadn't been worried about accessing the house. 

As soon as I pull the door open, I press my wrist under my nose and over my mouth, expecting a smell, a mix of stale blood, body rot, and defecation. The dining room is less of a room and more of a section of the main living space, a long mahogany table between the front family space and the open kitchen toward the back of the house. As I move through the kitchen, I brace myself for the sight of the Baratheon's dead, gruesome bodies, hoping that the lack of light will save me from the worst of it. I keep my eyes locked on the dining table, but the surface is clean, save for a bowl of sparkling, crystal apples and pears. My eyes instinctively scan the room and I immediately notice something is missing. I hit the light switch that turns on the chandelier above the dining table, confirming what my eyes had seen in the dark. 

They are gone. Mr. and Mrs. Baratheon, dead or alive, are not in this room. I uncover my nose and mouth and sniff. I smell no death, but no life either. Bleach, Pinesol, soap and Fabreeze. It is clear that something happened, I hadn't just imagined it. If nothing had happened I'd be smelling Mrs. Baratheon's overpowering perfume and Mr. Baratheon's cigar smoke, leftovers cooking in the oven. This isn't right. It is too staged. 

Something else is missing, too. The bodies are gone and so is the dagger. The stand on the mantel is empty. And where is my phone?

That man. Was it a man? The one in all black. The one with no face, but somehow I could still feel his eyes penetrating me. I could just barely hear the sound of his gloves squeaking against the banister as he held himself there, not chasing me, not moving his feet at all. He had done this. He had come here to kill the Baratheons, watched me finish the job, let me go, and then cleaned it all up, making it look like it never happened. He made it all go away, and he never even came after me when he was through.

I find myself smiling, because this is good news. It means I'm not crazy – not hallucinating at least – and it means that I was in the clear. If there were no bodies, there was no crime, right? Eventually someone will wonder where the Baratheons are, but Stannis only works part-time and their rich after all. They could have taken a spontaneous extended vacation to Morocco for all anyone knows. 

I lock all the doors and windows throughout the house to make it appear at first glance that the Baratheons had locked up before leaving town. I also make sure my phone is no where to be found. It concerns me that this faceless man has my phone, but it's password protected so I choose to let it go, to focus on the good and disregard the suspicious. I lock the backdoor last, as I'm leaving, then make my way home, keeping their key ring just in case.

* * * * *

**JON**

It has been dark for hours. In two, we are to make our way to the docks where Roose will be waiting with the boat to take us back to the basement where we'll regroup and plan for the next name on the list. I'm sitting on the floor in a corner of a small secondary bedroom in the farm house, empty of any real furniture and it's cold, even colder than the basement. I look at the girl's phone – Daenerys's phone – for the hundredth time. The time reads 10:30 above the empty space where it wants me to type in a password. Normally I don't care what time it is. I never have anything to do until Roose or Ramsay tell me to do it. Tonight, I care. I care what time it is because there is something I need to do before we leave tonight. I put the phone in my pocket and find the dagger I've kept hidden in my duffel bag. I wrap it in a thin shirt and tuck it under my belt.

“What's up?” Ramsay asks me as I leave my room, making my way toward the front door. 

I take the van keys from the kitchen and continue out of the house, feeling Ramsay follow me. 

“What are you doing?” he asks when we're outside. There's something strange in his voice. It's that fake concern, but also fear, probably because I'm being unpredictable again and that's unlike me. Ramsay always knows exactly what I'm doing and what I'm going to do, but not anymore. Not since last night. 

As soon as my hand is on the driver's side door handle, Ramsay's lands hard on my shoulder like lightening. I pull away. His eyes are staring into me, his forehead creased. 

“What are you doing, brother? We've gotta be at the dock in a couple hours.”

I pull the door open. 

“Jon.”

I pull the shirt-wrapped dagger from my belt and toss it on the passenger seat, then climb up into the driver's. 

“You're coming back, though, right?” Ramsay asks and he looks genuinely confused. I'd never seen his eyes so wide with uncertainty. 

I nod and close the door. He lets me go.

The first thing I do is drive back to the house where the man on the list lives – lived, because now he lives in a hole in the woods behind an abandoned farm house. The girl – Daenerys. Daenerys hadn't arrived in a car last night. I would have heard it. I would have seen it's lights as it drove away after she left the house. She obviously lives close, but there are very few homes on this road. In fact, the man from the list's house is the first one I come by as I drive North on the winding road for what feels like a couple miles. I continue on slowly. I have the van lights shut off to be inconspicuous, but that makes it almost impossible to see anything through my mask. Even if I wanted to, though, taking it off wouldn't be a good idea. We are supposed to abandon the van near the docks and I can't risk leaving any of my DNA behind.

Eventually I see a light, dim and yellow, coming from between a few trees on the right side of the road. I pull over the van in the dirt along the road, the tree branches hanging over it, concealing it from sight unless you're really paying attention. 

I bring the dagger with me and I walk silently. It's always been my best talent. Even more than cleaning and following directions, I'm great at being silent. I just need to see if this is where she – Daenerys – comes from, if this is her house. I need to see her to know. I'll recognize her immediately because I haven't been able to keep her image out of my head. It's as if I'm looking at a photograph of her always. White hair. Pink lips. Blue eyes.

The square front window is the one glowing with yellow light, but the blinds are drawn and all I see when I step up close are white, horizontal panels. So I walk around the house, trying to find another window. I step around bushes and trees. Silent. 

But then I hear something other than silence. Music. Faint but growing louder as I round the house. 

The earth dips down in the start of a hill that would eventually merge with the beach past the trees. The back deck remains level with the house, standing on wooden stilts. The platform is the height of my shoulders. There is more yellow light coming from the prominent back windows, illuminating the deck. There is a blaze going in a fire pit on the deck. 

I hear the sliding door open.

_“Do talk. Take my hand and let me hear your heartbeat,”_ the voice from the stereo sings to a melodic piano tune and steady symbol beat. _“Being here with you feels so right. We could live forever tonight. Let's not think about tomorrow. Don't talk, put your head on my shoulder.”_

There are quiet, padded footsteps on the wood and my eyes see pale feet and ankles emerge from the house. My gaze trails up slender calves to supple thighs where the fabric of cotton shorts begin, just a sliver showing under the hem of a large gray t-shirt. Her arms are bare, leading to thin wrists and perfect, porcelain hands that grip a mug. She takes a sip, pressing the rim to her plump, pink lips. Her hair is braided from behind her head down her back. The collar of her shirt hangs off of her delicate shoulder. Her neck is long and her eyes flutter as they look up at the stars.

Daenerys. 

The air is cold but somehow she is not. She makes her own heat, I decide. That's what the sun does. I wish I could circle to the deck's staircase and present to her the dagger formally, like she is a queen and I am her servant, but I'm not that strong. Too afraid.

I feel a thick raindrop hit the top of my head, then another. The clouds are rolling in, covering the stars. Daenerys feels the rain too because she's shuffling over to the fire pit and turning the handle until the flames are gone. She's inside the house a few seconds later and the sliding door shuts behind her. I don't hear it lock, though. 

Briefly I had a thought that I could leave the phone and dagger on the deck, perhaps beside the fire so that she would be sure to notice them, but I cannot leave either outside in the rain and this deck offers no awning of shelter. I decide to crouch under the deck and wait, watching the light on the ground for when it will eventually shut off, listening for the sound of silence to envelope the house. According to Daenerys's phone, it's 11:30. That's when normal people go to sleep. 

* * * * *

**DAENERYS**

When it begins to rain again, I hurry back inside after shutting off the fire pit I had been drawing beside for the past couple of hours. A drop of rain water had splashed into my hot chocolate and even though it's harmless, I dump the remaining contents of my mug out in the sink. I figure now is as good a time as any to take a bath. My second one today, but I want to luxuriate as much as possible before I'm arrested for murder. 

I pull my dad's old Beach Boys album from the record player and put it away, then turn out all the lights in the main room, save for the light over the stove. A nightlight for when I inevitably have to get a snack or water from the kitchen after my bath. 

Ten minutes pass and the tub is finally full. I leave my pajamas on the floor and step in. Lying back in the hot water, steam rising up and around my face to make my forehead sweat, I close my eyes and relax, letting my mind wander to things I shouldn't be thinking about, letting my hand wander where it shouldn't while I think these things. All that results, though, is disappointment and I shake my head, heaving a long sigh. Missandei is too far in the past and Mrs. Baratheon's grotesque head wound and unsightly body spasms taint my reflection of last night's event. 

My hand stays where it is, though, because I try something new. I fast-forward my memories through Mrs. Baratheon's death. She's already dead now, blood oozing from the gash in her chest, flowing down the sides of her sweater to pool on the floor. Blood looks so good atop marble. I didn't have a lot of time to gaze upon the sight, though. It was like I could just sense him, watching me kill her. 

He isn't the first to know my secret, to see me for who I truly am. That would be Missandei. She knew it the second I showed her the knife, her eyes bulging, mouth gaped, but I'd plunged it deep into her chest before she could utter a sound. But then she was gone and I was back to having my secret all to myself. Mrs. Baratheon couldn't possibly have been in the right mind to even comprehend that I was about to kill her, but either way, she is dead now too. That leaves the man without a face, though I'm sure he has to have a face beneath his disguise. I wonder what it looks like. He's the only person in the world who knows who I am and yet I don't even know what color his eyes are, what color his skin is or his hair.

I feel it now. My nerves are finally responding to my touch. I swallow hard, wishing I had tasted the blood that spilled from Mrs. Baratheon's chest just as I'd tasted Missandei's. It wasn't just the taste I wanted, though, it was the look. I wanted the faceless man to see me do it. I wanted the eyes he hid from me to watch me dip my fingers into the flow of red and bring them to my lips. I wanted him to wish he was my fingers as I slid them across my tongue. 

While my right hand carries on between my thighs, I lift my other out of the water and press two fingers past my lips. Instead of blood, though, I taste bath water. Disappointing, but I persist. I pretend I'm tasting tart, warm blood, but I'm not tasting it from my own fingers anymore. I'm tasting it from his.

I whimper as I suck. The water makes a gentle sloshing sound as my arm shakes along with my hand's quick movements against my clit. I swallow the liquid I've sucked from my fingers. I raise my knees up higher until they poke out of the water. Breathing rapid now, I begin to lose myself.

I wish I had brought the dagger up to my lips and ran my tongue up it's flat surface. Would he have liked that? Or maybe he would have preferred me to run the dagger across my body instead, smearing the blood across my tummy and tits.

My toes curl and I wine under my breath, shoulders and hips convulsing perhaps not unlike Mrs. Baratheon's half-dead body. When I've had enough, I hold my palm against my pussy and shudder an exhale. Slowly, my muscles begin to relax again, but with that relaxation, comes an empty feeling. Empty because nothing has changed. My fate is still in the hands of others. Detectives who would soon discover the truth and come after me. The faceless man who could still decide to kill me as a way to tie up a loose end. Empty because of all the things I can't control and all the things I don't know, but want to, like who is he, where is he?

Suddenly, I hear something. Faint, but it's there, and it isn't rain. Less a sound and more of an energy, pulling my attention to another part of the house. I know I'm not alone anymore. Someone is here with me.

Moving as quietly as possible, I stand and climb out of the tub, letting water cascade down my naked skin to make small puddles on the floor. I pull on my shorts and t-shirt without even drying off. Walking on the damp balls of my feet, I tip toe out of the bathroom, through the master bedroom and into the hallway, following the light I'd left on above the stove.

When I reach the end of the hall, I peer around the wall, out toward the living area. My eyes scan the room, starting where the light it brightest in the kitchen to where it dissipates into shadows until, eventually, darkness. 

I almost miss him. 

He blends so neatly in with the night, standing between the sofa and the coffee table, still as a statue made of black cloth, head to toe. His head is downcast at the coffee table. It's where I'd left my sketchbook open.

I curl back into the hall and take a long, silent breath, trying to steady my heartbeat that I could hear thumping in my ears as loud as that Beach Boys album. I could just go back to my room and lock the door. He'd break down the door eventually, but it would buy me some time. Time to do what, though? I wasn't a fighter. Straight C's in gym, remember? All I could do was thrust blades into chest cavities. And I didn't have a blade in my bedroom. 

No. Fighting is futile. And at least dying in the warmth of my own home, my favorite home from childhood, is better than spending the rest of my life in prison. It even sounds better than crawling on my knees to my father, begging him to help me. 

Gathering up all of my courage, I turn again. This time, stepping fully out of the hallway and into the main room. I'm facing him now. At least I won't die a coward. He's heard me and knows I'm here. His head raises, then slowly he turns and now we face each other. I feel like I'm in a Western film, about to duel with the town's member who cheated me at poker. But, only one of us has a weapon. My eyes catch the glint of Valyrian steel. He's holding the dagger at his side, it's tip pointed to the floor. 

“You're here to kill me,” I say softly, but my voice still echos in the wideness of this room. I swallow hard. “I understand. I deserve to die. You saw what I did last night. It wasn't even the first time I'd done that either, and I know that if I don't die soon, I'll do it again because it's the only thing that makes me feel real. I know that I don't deserve it, but can you do it quickly? Not like what you did to the Baratheons.”

His head shakes, turning methodically right, then left, then center. I don't know what it means, but I can only assume it means that he isn't going to kill me quick. He'll drag it out. We're alone here, after all. What else has he got to do? He'll torture me a bit, I suppose. 

A tear slips from my eyelid before I even notice my eyes had begun to water. 

“Who are you? What's your name?” I ask, for no reason except that I don't know what else to do.

Instead of responding, he turns back to the coffee table and lays the dagger upon it, right beside my sketchbook. He reaches then into his pocket and now I'm truly perplexed. He pulls out, not another weapon, but a cell phone – my phone – and lays that down as well, on the opposite side of my sketchbook. 

After another glance at me, he turns and walks, his footsteps making no sound at all, like he's floating over the wood, and then he's slipping out the backdoor and into the rain, not bothering to close the door behind him. 

I'm frozen in place. Paralyzed. 

Minutes pass before I am able to move my legs. At first I think I've peed myself, but then remember that my shorts are wet because I'd dressed without toweling off first. I walk to the coffee table and stand in the same exact spot the faceless man had stood in and look down at what he'd been looking at. In the barely-there light, I can just make out the contents of my latest sketch. A man dressed as a shadow, standing in an inch deep pool of red pencil.

* * * * *

**JON**

I wasn't even late this time, but Theon was still pissed. Ramsay was pissed too, but not because I was late. It was because he didn't know where I went. He used to like it that I never spoke, but now he's discovering it's a double edged sword.

We're driving to the docks now, making the turns Roose had told us to in our plans. It's the same way we came when we got to this island, but somehow the trip feels longer. Maybe it's because I don't know where our destination is this time. The basement, of course, but only for another night or two. Then we'll be off somewhere else, on a new assignment, to cross out another name on the list, a name with a big number scribbled beside it. Maybe it's because every minute we drive, I'm a minute farther away from her – Daenerys. 

White hair. Pink lips. Blue eyes. 

Slender calves. Supple thighs. Long neck. 

The collar of her shirt exposing a milky shoulder.

Standing just a couple yards from me, her blue eyes filled with emotion, her bottom lip trembling just slightly. No matter how dark the room was, she glowed and I took in her every inch. Her legs and arms sprinkled with water droplets, making her shine. Water stains made her t-shirt cling to her chest and as she took in each inhale, I could just barely make out the shape of her breasts. 

And then she spoke and I thought the sound would knock me over. Soft but strained. Afraid, but accepting. She spoke how I felt every day. “You're here to kill me. I understand.” But I wouldn't kill her. I can't kill anyone, but especially not her. “I'll do it again,” she'd confessed. “It's the only thing that makes me feel real.” But she's the only thing that makes me feel real. If she's going to do it again, she's going to need me. I have to protect her. 

We arrive at the dock and it's like the universe is trying to tell me I need to stay with her, because Roose isn't here, only his friend, a half-bald man with a gray beard. I don't know if I'd be able to challenge Roose. Not when Ramsay isn't on my side. Not when I can't even speak the words I want to. 

I have my duffel bag in one hand and my backpack full of extra clothes in another, but I make no move to put either in the boat while my accomplices transfer their bags into the boat. Eventually, when we are ready to go, Ramsay steps up to me, but this time I step back before his palm can connect with my shoulder. 

“It's time to go,” he says.

I shake my head. 

Chuckling like I'd just told a joke, he reaches out to purposefully grab my shoulder. “Look, no one is going to say anything to Roose about what happened. Everything went according to plan. But, you know what, I think what you did helped us. I think that Roose had been overly optimistic when he assumed we'd get off this fucking island before anyone found the bodies. You did a good thing, brother. You did what you had to do.”

Yes. I did. But I didn't do it for him.

He pulls my shoulder to get me to walk toward the boat, but I keep my feet steadily planted on the dock. Ramsay is a gun man. He has no real strength.

“What the fuck is going on with you? You actually want to stay here?”

I nod.

“This is a joke, right? What are you going to do here? Become a farmer? Open up a nice novelty candle shop on Main Street? You can't even fucking talk. You can't even take off that fucking mask. We need you, Jon. I need you. You're not staying.”

In response, I turn around and walk back to the van. I can feel Ramsay following me, but I decide not to care. One of the benefits of never being able to expose my face. He can't see how much he actually terrifies me. I open up the back hatch and toss my bags back in. Before I can close the back, though, I feel something dig into the back of my head. Then, I hear the click of a safety coming off of Ramsay's gun. 

“You think you can survive in this world without me?” he sneers. “You remember when we were kids? What happened to you before I started taking care of you? You were so fucking pathetic. On your knees. You were going to let them kill you, but I saved you. I didn't have to do that, but I did. I got you help. I stayed with you until they let you out of the hospital. And then I found the fuckers who did that to you, and I took care of them too. For you. Because you're my brother. Now get your shit on that boat. You're coming with me.”

If he knew me so well, he would know by his own speech that I don't care if he kills me or not. I step back, against his gun, the force causing him to lower it from my head. I shut the back hatch and walk around to the driver door. 

“We're leaving without you, then!” he says after me. “You'll be all alone here!”

No. Not alone. I'll be with her – Daenerys.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hallelujah! Meant to post this update sooner but my laptop went nuts and basically stopped functioning. Spent the last three days trying to fix it myself and thankfully, after wiping the drive and reinstalling Windows 10, I am back in business! Back up your work, y'all!! I lost all of my files but blessings on myself for saving my essential files (including this story!) to a flash drive literally one day before my laptop started crashing. I do not think I would have been able to completely re-write this story from memory lol. Enjoy!

**DAENERYS**

It's the next evening and I'm pacing. As soon as the sky darkened and the moon began to glow, big and fierce, I had the chilling feeling like the night was bringing something else along with it. I'm being paranoid. If the faceless man had intended to kill me, he'd have done it last night. Instead, he released his weapon and left. He'd even given me a method of calling the authorities on him. I hardly ate all today. Mostly, I stayed cooped up, listening to music and playing games on my phone. It wasn't until night fell that I realized I had been waiting all day – waiting for him. 

It's silly, because why would he come back? If he had never intended to kill me then his only intention was to give me back my phone and the dagger. Except. . . the dagger was never mine. He knew that. He'd most likely seen me take it from the Baratheons' mantel. Why would he want me to have it? Was it a gift? A thank you for completing his task? How corporate. 

Standing in the living room, I stare out the back windows but with the lights on indoors, all I see is my reflection and the reflection of the room around me. Whether he comes back or not, I'm optimistic that he will. I wonder if maybe he is here already, standing among the trees out back, staring at me while I stare at myself. He'd have such a great view.

At midnight, I shut off the record player, put the books I'd skimmed away, and turned out all the lights save for the one over the stove, just like last night. Also like last night, I leave the backdoor unlocked. It's foolish. I'm the most foolish girl in the world, but there is something so exciting about it still, the idea of him coming in while I'm in bed. Maybe he decides to kill me after all, but I deserve it anyway. If he doesn't. . . maybe I'll find out what he really wants from me. And if he doesn't show up – well, no harm done.

I don't take a bath before bed. It's okay because I took one in the afternoon. I leave my bedroom door open a foot, enough for him to see that I'm here, enough that he would have to push it in farther if he wanted to enter. I even leave one of the sconce lights on in the en-suite bathroom so that a soft glow befalls my bedroom, just enough to give him a good view. Then I crawl into bed, wearing only my sleep shirt and panties, pulling the sheet and blankets up to my waist. 

The last thing I do, is open up the nightstand drawer and remove from it the Valyrian steel dagger. I carefully set the blade atop the nightstand, handle facing the bedroom door. Let it's shimmer be the first thing he sees. Let my sleeping body be the second. Except, I won't be sleeping. It's too early for me. I'm a night owl. I stay up all night and sleep into the afternoon. That had been my natural schedule since puberty. I turn on my side, facing the far wall, back to the door. It's cold, but I'm sweating. Scared, but a good kind of scared. 

The worst part of this is that I don't have my phone handy to check the time. I can't tell if two hours have past, or if it's been a mere twenty minutes. But, eventually, I hear it. The sound of the sliding back door opening. It's faint. I have to concentrate hard, but I know that he's here. 

I keep my eyes open, staring at the wall. I still hear him, but it's taking forever for him to move to the hallway. He doesn't know which room I'm in, but there are only four doors to check and I don't hear him pulling open any of the others. It isn't footsteps I hear so much as it is the shifting of air as he moves through it. Like when you can tell a TV is on in the other room even though it's on mute. A human gives off an energy just like that and I've always been able to tell when I'm not alone. 

Covered in goosebumps now, I flinch when the air moves around my bedroom door, but I force myself to keep my body calm and my breathing even. I need him to believe I'm asleep. I need to know what he'll do if he knows he can do anything to me.

So cold, but also so hot. I don't know what to do with my hands. I'm suddenly uncomfortable, but not because I can feel his eyes on me or because I can sense him inching closer and closer to my bed. I'm uncomfortable because my shirt is bunched awkwardly against my hip and I want to adjust it. I want to take the whole thing off. My arm is lying at a strange angle in front of me and I want to tuck it under the covers. I want to press it between my legs. My hair is draped over my neck and I want to push it away. I want to feel his energy against my bare skin. 

When he is close enough to my bed, I can see his shadow on the wall in front of me. A shadow's shadow. He stops, though, and I wait impatiently for him to move again. I wonder if he notices the dagger. I close my eyes, just in case he can tell.

In my mind, I will him to touch me, but he never does. He just watches me. He's a watcher. I understand that now. He liked watching me kill Mrs. Baratheon. But then I hear something else, and this time it's an actual sound. The light scraping of steel on wood. He's picking up the dagger. For some reason, though, I'm not worried. 

And then, I feel him leave. I feel him all the way until I hear the light squeak of the sliding door again.

I gasp in an inhale and snap my eyes open. I turn onto my back and, sure enough, the dagger is gone from the nightstand. I'm confused and anxious and excited. I wish he hadn't taken it only because I feel a burning desire to slide the golden handle between my thighs. My hand will do, though, and I cum quicker than I have since the night I drove that hunting knife into Missandei's heart. 

It's almost noon when I wake up and I pull myself out of bed like I'm hungover. I turn on the bath and while I wait for it to fill, I walk to the kitchen for a hot chocolate. It isn't until I have the mug in my hands, sipping the hot beverage tentatively, that I notice gold and steel lying on the coffee table in the living room, in the same exact place the faceless man had set the ornate dagger the night before. 

He hadn't taken it. He had moved it. He wanted me to know that he had been here. I smile, a grin, ear to ear. 

* * * * *

Each night I leave the backdoor unlocked, and each night he comes to watch me pretend to sleep. Each night I leave the dagger atop my nightstand and each morning when I wake up, I am giddy to find it in a new place. Beside the toaster in the kitchen, on the window sill behind the dining room table, inside the glass liquor cabinet. A little game we play. 

Exactly a week after he first came to visit me, I go about the same routine. The back door is unlocked, the stove light on. My bedroom door is open a foot, a dim light from the bathroom left on. I lay on my side, facing the wall. This time, though, after minutes of him watching my back, when I hear that familiar scraping of steel on wood, I make the compulsive decision to be bold. 

Eyes closed, bed covers down to my hips, I turn onto my back in the way one would while still asleep. I turn onto my back and let my head lull to the side, facing him, and I can tell he hasn't gone. He's still standing there. Something new to see. I'm not wearing my usual sleep shirt either. Instead, I have on a sleeveless undershirt, thin and white, and I can feel that it's risen just enough on my body to expose my abdomen. I take long, purposeful breaths, letting my chest rise and fall in a way that would drive any straight man crazy. My nipples are hard, almost uncomfortably so. “Touch me,” I almost whisper, but I focus on my breathing and my nipples and parting my lips just enough to make him wish they were on his skin. Skin I still haven't seen.

I don't know what I want to happen. Maybe that's the point. I want him to surprise me, and in a way, he does. I feel him inch closer to my bed, now closer to me than he'd ever been before. And then, he does nothing. He just stands there, by the side of my bed, watching me. I think I can here him breathe unsteady breaths, but it could just be in my mind. Maybe all of this is in my mind.

After some time, I start to actually relax, and after some more time, I think I may fall asleep for real. But then I feel him leave, just as he always does. I do something else that's bold. I let my eyes open and I watch his back as he moves so quietly across the room and out my bedroom door, dagger in hand. 

I sense him moving down the hall and before I can even wrap my head around why I'm doing it, I'm out of my bed, feet moving me quickly out of my room and down the hall, toward the glow of light from the kitchen. 

“Wait,” I say, my bare feet making the wood floors squeak as I come to a stop in the living room. My voice sounds like an explosion in the silence of this room. 

He stops as well, just in front of the back door, then slowly turns. We stare at each other, him in his usual garb and me in just an undershirt and panties. The dagger is no longer in his hand and I wonder where I'll find it once he's gone. 

“My name's Daenerys. What's your name?” I ask, almost like I'm speaking to a stray cat I don't want running away.

After a minute of silence, I let out a breathy, nervous laugh. “Do you ever speak?”

His head shakes slowly, right, then left, then center.

“I suppose that's good. You won't tell anyone what I did.” 

I'd said it as a half-joke. He shook his head the same as always. 

“I won't tell anyone what you did.”

This time, he looks down. I don't know what that means. Is he ashamed? Why would he be, if he had seen what I'd done?

Carefully, I step forward. I want to know how tall he is compared to me. If I can't know anything else, at least I can know that. His back straightens as I approach. He's tall. Maybe not as tall as the average man, but he's taller than me.

I reach my hand out. “You're real, right?”

He takes a step back, but his head nods. 

“I can't touch you?”

He doesn't nod, but his head does not shake either. 

Stepping closer, I can smell him now. Wet earth and sweat. I find myself drawn to it and now my toes are only inches from his shoes. Again, I lift my hand and stretch my fingers until the tips graze the leather of his glove. Proof. He's real. But I want more. 

I curve my fingers into his palm and carry it away from his side so that I can hold it between us. Now, I can hear his breathing and I know that I'm affecting him. Staring down at his hand, I feel a zipper on the side of his wrist and my fingers pinch it and drag it down. His skin is cold and smooth and pale. He's young. I can tell. And his pulse is racing, just like mine.

Looking up at his cloth-covered face, I whisper “I know you like watching me. I want you to know that I like you watching me.”

I release his hand and let him leave. He's troubled somehow, maybe disabled, maybe just ashamed.

The dagger is resting in the bookshelf near the front door and I take it back to my room where I shed my clothes and spread out on the bed. I twist a fleece blanket around the blade a few times before gripping it in my hand and then I slide the handle against my wet pussy. It's cold and smooth, just like his flesh. 

* * * * *

**JON**

I've been getting out before the sun leaves the sky. Practicing. Growing steadily accustomed to it's rays shining down on me. I still cannot bare my skin in the daylight, but I take my gloves and even my sweater off at dusk when the trees can block most of the receding sun's heat. Even with this progress, when Daenerys slid her fingers through the unzipped seam of my glove, grazing my bare wrist, it felt like molten steel and it took everything in me not to hiss in pain. I had run away from her then, because I didn't know what else to do. I wanted to feel her hands everywhere on me, burning me away, inch by inch until there's nothing left of me, but I was afraid.

Now, I stand in the field in front of the farm house. The sun is half way down. A weatherman would say the air is cool, but I'm sweating. My hands look white as paper as I raise them to my neck. Slowly, I roll up the fabric, up over my chin and nose and forehead until my head is released from the mask's encasement. 

The air is the cleanest I've breathed in years. It makes me lightheaded and after a minute I am forced to bring my hand up to cover my nose and mouth, but even my own hand against my face stings. I have to do this, though. Not just for Daenerys, but for me. Me without Ramsay. Me with Daenerys, so that the next time her fingers touch my skin, I don't run away. 

I can't even remember the last time I'd let another person touch my skin. I remember the last time someone tried. A prostitute that Ramsay had gotten for me when we were nineteen. He thought it was time for me to finally be with a woman, but I had no interest in that. Sure, I was attracted to her the way anyone is attracted to a woman with large breasts and round hips and cat eyes that see right through your soul. But attraction wasn't enough to make me okay with her touching me.

The first thing she did when she saw me was laugh. That wasn't so bad, because I was used to people laughing at me. 

“What's with the mask?” she'd asked Ramsay. Everyone always asked that and they always asked Ramsay. That had annoyed me at first because it made me feel like I didn't really exist. Eventually I began to prefer not existing so I began to not mind that either. 

“Don't worry about that. He's. . .” The word trailed off as Ramsay raised his eyebrows and tapped the side of his head with his finger. He always tells people I'm mentally challenged and eventually I stopped even caring about that as well. Hell, maybe I am mentally challenged. It isn't like I've ever been to a shrink or even a real doctor since what happened in the alleyway when I was fourteen. 

The woman looked warily at me, staying close to Ramsay until he assured her that I was harmless. That is something I'll never get used to. People being more afraid of me than of Ramsay just because I don't want anyone to see my face or hear my voice or touch my skin. I'm not the dangerous one. He is. But I'm the freak.

Ramsay forced me into his bedroom alone with her and she tried her best not to look nervous. I don't think she could tell that I was nervous as well. She'd undressed in front of me, showing me her perfect skin and the hair between her legs that was as red as her hair. She was beautiful, but when she walked up to me, I backed up until I hit the wall. 

“Don't worry, honey. I'm going to make you feel real good,” she purred. 

Shaking my head didn't work, because her hand was on me a second later, palming me under my belt.

I was lightheaded and breathing heavy, wanting desperately for her to stop, but it'd been a couple years since I'd spoken and the words just wouldn't form. When her hand slid up, under my shirt, I knew she wasn't going to stop. Ramsay had already paid her and business was business. As soon as I felt the electrical shock of her hand touching the flesh of my abdomen, my muscles reacted on their own, thrusting forward and shoving the woman back. She stumbled with a yelp, her back hitting the side of the bed.

Storming from the bedroom, I hurried into the bathroom of the small apartment Ramsay and I shared, and locked myself inside. An old habit from when I was young and my step-mother was angry with me. The bathroom had been the only room in the house with a lock on it and sometimes I'd spend hours just sitting on the tile floor, waiting until I thought she wasn't mad at me anymore. 

Ramsay was mad. So was the woman, but when she yelled at him, she found out how dangerous he was. I felt bad because she was getting hurt because of me, but I also didn't feel bad because she had hurt me first. After she'd left, crying, Ramsay tried to kick the bathroom door down, but he wasn't strong enough. He yelled and cursed at me and called me a faggot until he got high and settled down. 

I didn't come out of the bathroom until I pressed the side of my head against the door and heard that he was snoring in the living room. 

When the moon is high and the sky is black, I put my mask back on and drive to Daenerys's house. She knows that I watch her while she sleeps, but does she know that I watch her before she goes to bed, too? Does she know that I stand in the trees behind the deck and watch her drink from her mug, draw in her notebook, and sing along to music from a box under a television she never watches? I never liked watching television either. The colors on the screen are too bright and the sounds are too severe. I like the music she listens to, though, because it reminds me of the stuff my dad used to play for me in the home office after everyone else had gone to sleep. Sometimes she dances. Her socks make her spin on the hardwood floor. 

I wait a bit after she turns out the lights. It reassures me that she still wants me to come in when she double checks the back door to make sure it isn't locked. I think she leaves the stove light on for me as well. I don't need it to make my way through the house, but it helps me to see the drawings she leaves on the counter, always of me. I wish I could do something for her, to show her how much she means to me. 

There is something different about tonight, though. Her bedroom door is open all the way rather than just cracked. And I hear something. I hear her. She isn't asleep. 

Standing in the doorway, I gaze upon her. Just when I think I can be calm around her, she does something else to make me feel like I'm exploding inside, but with her, I like the explosions. 

She's lying atop the covers this time, on her back, dressed in a shirt and shorts. Her knees are parted and her hand is tucked inside those shorts, moving. Her eyes are shut and her lips are parted, soft sounds coming from her throat that make me swallow hard. I know that girls would sometimes touch themselves like guys do, and I know there are places on the computer you can go to see them do it, but no one had ever let me use a computer growing up and now I have no way of asking someone to teach me how they work, so I settle for my imagination. 

This is better than anything I've ever imagined, though. The way her hips move and her toes curl into the blankets. The way her chest rises and falls and her teeth chew at her bottom lip.

I watch her hand and how it curves deep inside her shorts. My own pants suddenly feel two sizes too small. When my eyes trail back up to watch her angelic face as it contorts with pleasure, my heart stops because her eyes are open, and looking right at me. 

I'm frozen, petrified, thinking she'll hide herself from my view, or scream at me to leave, but she does neither. She simply averts her gaze to the ceiling and continues to pleasure herself.

I'm glad she isn't looking at me anymore, because I can't stop myself from pressing my hand to my own crotch, rubbing my erection through my pants. It's like we're having sex, but we don't have to touch, and I think I'm in love with her. She never laughs at me. She asks me things instead of just doing them. She's gentle. She lets me watch her and she likes it. She's beautiful. Even the way she killed that woman was beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, until tonight. She's perfect and I love her. The first person I've loved, since my dad and my brother – my real brother. The only person I've ever loved quite like this. 

Even when I cum, it's silent. Her, not so much, but it's still soft and sweet and I want it to be the only thing I hear for the rest of my life. As soon as she begins to relax, I turn and leave. It's too much for me. I can't handle her eyes looking at me after I came in my pants standing in her doorway. Thankfully, she doesn't come after me this time. 

Before I leave, I realize that there is one thing she wants from me that I can give her. I stop at her drawing again, of me standing in the doorway of her bedroom, and I pick up the red pencil lying beside the notebook. 

* * * * * 

**DAENERYS**

As soon as I wake up the next day, I brush out my hair and take a shower. There's no reason to hurry into the main room because the faceless man never took the dagger from my nightstand to hide it in plain sight like an Easter egg hunt. I think that I spooked him again, and I feel bad about that. I don't want to scare him so much that he stops coming around. 

Last night, though. . . was amazing. I want to do it again. Maybe I'll get naked next time so he can see my tits. There's something so enticing about letting him see all of me while he hides all of himself.

When I'm dressed, I go into the main room to find my boots. I'm out of food so I'll have to make another grocery store run. I should also give the detective a call to check up on the investigation. It's what a normal person would do. It will be suspicious if I don't call.

I almost miss it. My boots are by the back door and as I walk past the kitchen island, I just barely catch it out of the corner of my eye. My sketch. But there's something added to it. A shock of red words scribbled into the paper at the very bottom. Two times I had asked him his name, and now I finally have an answer: _Jon Snow_.


	5. Chapter 5

**DAENERYS**

This time, I don't walk to the market. I drive into the village on the East side of the island near where the ferry landing is. I'm into my second week here, longer than I thought I'd have. That politician's murder must have really slowed things down regarding Missandei's case. Maybe the police department is hoping they'll uncover some wide spanning government conspiracy and have a movie made about them one day. 

I go to a couple of clothing shops first and buy a few things. Then I hit a book store and get some mystery novels – maybe they'll give me some ideas to use on Detective Naharis. After that, I hit a sandwich place and get an egg and cheese on sourdough and a raspberry lemonade. I sit out on the patio and dial a number from my phone's missed-calls history that I am fairly certain belongs to him.

He answers by stating his title and name. “Detective Naharis.”

“Hello. This is Daenerys Targaryen. I'm just calling to see if any progress has been made on my roommate's case. Is there anything you can tell me?”

“Oh. Hi, Miss Targaryen. Progress has been made in fact,” he replies and his tone seems nervous and I wonder if it's because he's already on to me. But then he says “I would have thought you'd seen the coverage on the news, but we have actually made an arrest.” 

I nearly choke on my sip of lemonade and have to fight the urge to grin. “You have? I'm sorry, I don't have cable on the island so I don't even bother turning the TV on. Who have you arrested? Her boyfriend?”

“No, no. Her boyfriend had an air tight alibi. The man we like for the murder right now is actually a T.A. from one of your friend's classes. He apparently had a thing for her and wasn't very subtle about it. Claims he was home alone the night of the murder, but there's no one to verify that and. . . Well, I really shouldn't disclose anything more. We're still looking into any possible leads we may have over looked, but there was enough probable cause to make an arrest.” 

While I am normally against innocent people going down for crimes they didn't commit, it's hard to feel bad for the man when it means I get off free. Besides, is anyone really innocent? 

“I hope he's the guy who did it, then. And if he is, I hope he rots.”

“Me, too. How are you holding up? I take it you haven't gone back to school yet.”

“No, I haven't. I don't know if I will. Maybe I'll take the rest of the year off.”

“Well, try not to isolate yourself too much. It'll drive you crazy.”

I smile. If he only knew how crazy I already am. I bid him a courteous goodbye then hang up and begin using my phone for another purpose. Unfortunately, when I google 'Jon Snow' nothing of any use comes up. There are a few men out there on some social media platforms with that name. Some fifty year old accountant in Omaha, a sixteen year old wannabe rap artist from Jacksonville, and a gay twenty-something tattoo artist in Nashua. Clearly, neither of these people were the faceless man. I wish I had good enough sleuthing skills to find a possible lead, but maybe those mystery novels will help with that as well.

Once I've finished my food, I go to the grocery store and stock up on some things. Boxed and frozen food and ingredients for meals that will take very little effort to cook. Paper towels, toilet paper and laundry detergent. I'm shopping optimistically, like I'll actually be around to use up all of these products. 

The drive home takes a little while, and when I pull into my driveway, I see that there is another car in front of my porch. At first, my heart races, thinking that it's Detective Naharis and the reason he had sounded nervous on the phone was because he was having to lie about arresting some man when he was really just waiting for me to get home so he could arrest me. But, this car was not police issued. It was a silver, luxury sedan. 

My eyes travel from the vehicle to the porch and sure enough, sitting atop the steps is Viserys Targaryen, my big brother, lanky as ever and hair as white as mine and a permanent smirk playing on his angular face. 

“Surprise!” he said, standing and outstretching his arms. 

I roll my eyes as I exit my car. “Good!” I call out. “You can help me unload all the shit I just bought!”

He didn't, of course. Once I had the front door unlocked, he was inside trying to make the cable work on the TV.

“Why are you here?” I ask with frustration after putting away all of my purchases. 

While on hold with the cable company, Viserys looks at me innocently. “Can't I come visit my little sister in her time of need?”

“My time of need?”

“Yeah, being that you found you friend totally disemboweled and everything. But I guess you've never been squeamish.” 

“She wasn't disemboweled. She didn't even feel it. . . I'm guessing. And the only thing I need is to be alone. So you can just go on back to California.”

Face scrunching, he sunk down into the sofa and propped his feet on the coffee table, making a show of settling in. “The California thing didn't exactly pan out the way I'd planned.”

“So that's why you're here. You ran out of money again and Dad isn't paying your bills anymore? What the hell were you doing down there?”

He points one of his spindly fingers at me with squinted eyes. “Don't start with me, Dany. I had to fly coach to get here so quick so I'm already pissed off. Oh, and when a real person finally picks up the phone, I'm going to need your credit card. Mine are shot to shit.”

“Dad says I don't have to give you my cards anymore.”

“I don't give a shit what Dad says. Get the fucking card.”

Heaving a sigh, I go into my purse and pull my Discover card out of my wallet. I toss it to him and he catches it in one hand. 

After spending a long time ordering a customer service representative to restore our cable in a very condescending tone, Viserys hops off the sofa and wanders down the hall. I get up from where I'd been reading at the kitchen island and follow him, because I have a sinking suspicion about where he's going.

Just as I thought, he swerves straight into the master bedroom. 

“This is where I've been staying,” I tell him. 

“That's fine,” he says with a smile, but I know it's too good to be true. “You can stay where ever you want when I'm not here, but I'm here now, so you can move your shit into a different bedroom while I'm out tonight. Met this chick who works at the airport.”

“And you're going to wash the sheets yourself then?” I ask with snark, my hands on my hips. 

His smile turns to a smirk. “Why? What have you been doing in the sheets?”

I don't respond, feeling weak and gross inside. To say that I hate my brother isn't doing my feelings justice. Maybe it's hypocritical of me to condemn him as being an awful person, considering what I've done, but I've never hurt anyone to watch them suffer. I've never enjoyed inflicting pain. It's that differential that I use to justify why Viserys is evil whereas I am just. . . sick. I'll probably never know what really happened in California, but I know for certain that someone got hurt because of him. Physically, emotionally, financially. 

When the back of his fingers raise to my cheek, I flinch away from him, wishing my dagger were in my hand so that I might slice them right off. Maybe I do wish to inflict pain on another person, but only Viserys, and only because he deserves it. 

On cue, my brother's eyes turn toward my night stand. “What the hell is that?” he asks, parting his hand from my skin and walking over to where the dagger still lays in front of the bedside lamp. 

And then his disgusting hands are on it, staining the glimmering steel and elegant gold with evil energy. He's picking it up and I feel as though he's holding a child of mine. I want to run up and shove him away, but my feet are afraid and I move slowly. 

“It's mine,” I state meekly.

“This is not yours. This must be worth ten thousand at least. What the hell are you doing with it?”

It's worth way more than that, I suspect. Mr. Baratheon would not have proudly displayed it on his mantle if he had paid so little as ten thousand dollars. I don't say that, though. 

“It's just a prop. A gift from some guy I went out with a few times.”

“This is real gold. I don't care what guy you went out with, your cunt is not worth this much.”

“Fuck you,” I spit before I can think. 

Viserys lurches toward me and I think he's going to hit me, but he's too enchanted by the blade to bother punishing me. His eyes avert back to it, gazing at it greedily like she is a high end whore willing to do anything for the right price.

“This is mine now,” he says simply. “This will fix a lot for me.”

“No, it's mine. It was given to me. You can't have it,” I object, the same way I used to when we were kids and he would take all of my favorite toys just to destroy them in front of me.

He turns to leave the room and I foolishly jolt forward and grab his shirt, reaching for the dagger which causes it to slip from his hand and clang to the floor. I quickly let go of Viserys and freeze because his eyes are ablaze and that vein in his forehead is pulsing with anger at me. I know it's coming, but I'm still surprised when his hand juts out and collides with the side of my face with a sharp cracking sound, smacking me so hard my legs give out and I fall to the floor just like the dagger. Sisters.

Through my watering eyes, I see Viserys stoop and pick the dagger back up. While he polishes it with his shirt, I plead “Please, you can't sell it. It doesn't belong to me. The Baratheons went out of town shortly after I got here and Mr. Baratheon asked me to take care of it in case their house got broken into. He's loves it and I promised I'd take care of it.”

“Stannis Baratheon?” 

I nod, rubbing my raw, stinging cheek with my palm.

Grumbling under his breath, Viserys flings the dagger to land on the bed. “Fine, but I'm keeping your Discover card. Where's your AmEx?”

“My purse.”

“Is the pin still your birthday?”

I nod and he snickers, calling me a brainless bitch.

“Alright. I'm going out for a few hours so you better be here to let me back in. And clean up this room while I'm gone.” He turns to leave the room, but stops in the doorway and faces me again. “And get off the fucking floor, Dany. I didn't actually hurt you.”

But I didn't get off the floor until long after I'd heard him leave through the front door. I was parked behind him in the driveway so he most likely drove over the flowerbed to get out, but I was much more concerned with the state of my face than the landscaping. When I finally drag myself off the floor, I go into the bathroom and examined my face. Red and slightly swollen, as are my eyes.

I put the bedding in the washer first and change the sheets, then go about setting up one of the smaller bedrooms for myself. While I begrudgingly go about these chores for my sweet brother, I think back to the Baratheons. I'd cringed at the sight of them, finding the method of killing to be barbaric, but I am now seeing the appeal in such brutish violence. While I don't know if I'd be capable of such acts, I wouldn't mind taking a bat to Viserys and watching him thrash on the floor and gurgle blood until I finally decide to take his pathetic life away from him.

* * * * * 

**JON**

I'm at Daenerys's house as usual, but I see through the back windows that the stove light isn't on. I put my hand on the sliding door and it doesn't budge. Locked. 

First, I feel empty. Defeated. She doesn't want me looking upon her anymore. I'd let her fill me up and make me want to be different than I am. I could feel myself changing, but now, I am nothing.

Then, I feel afraid. Angry. I don't feel her warmth anywhere near this house. She isn't here. Someone has taken her. Someone has uncovered her crimes and has taken her away from me.

Something white catches my eye, down by my feet. It clashes with the black of the mat in front of the door and the brown wood of the deck made darker by the night. A piece of paper, a corner of it tucked under the mat I stand upon. There isn't a cloud in the sky tonight and the brightness of the moon is all it takes for me to make out a word written upon the paper. 

_”Jon Snow”_

My name, spelled out in swirling red letters.

I kneel and pick up the paper. I turn it over. I'm glad that it isn't a letter, because I've never been great at reading and Daenerys seems like she would use fancy words in letters. Instead, it's a picture. Another drawing, telling me where she is. 

The moon leads me to her, through a path carved in the woods behind her house. I've folded up the paper and put it in my back pocket, because it has my name on it and that makes me believe it's mine. I want to look at it later, when the sun is up. Maybe the light will be easier to tolerate if I'm using it to look at something Daenerys made.

When the trees end and the beach begins, my shoes hit sand and I see Daenerys standing in warm clothes and boots just above the tide line. She's looking out toward the horizon, hair in a braid down her back, and I wonder how long she's been standing out here. I don't even know what time it is.

She wanted me to come here, so I walk up to her, but with caution. Eventually, she senses me and turns. I stop then, a couple yards away, because I still think I will scare her, but she isn't scared. She is calm, but it's a dispirited calm. Her eyes are like glass under the stars. 

“My brother's here. Inside,” she says. “He got here about mid-day, took all my money and bought drugs with it, came home drunk with some whore about an hour ago which is probably a good thing. Gives him someone to fuck who isn't me.” Her hands dig into her sweater pockets and she sighs down at her feet. “I shouldn't have said that. He's never. . . I think that he sometimes wants to, though, but he just hits me instead. I've always been afraid of him. Maybe that's why I'm so fucked up. After having this person make me feel so worthless my whole life, my head got warped and now the only way I can feel anything at all is to make other people feel nothing at all, forever. . . I shouldn't blame him. It isn't his fault. Plenty of people have shitty abusive brothers or fathers or boyfriends or whatever, and they aren't fucking murderers like me. I think that I was just made this way. Made to kill. I killed my mother, you know. She died giving birth to me. She took her last breaths at the same time I took my first. It's an omen.”

Lifting her hands out of her pockets, she presses the heels of her palms to her eyes and rubs. When she moves them away, she looks exhausted. 

“I don't know why I'm telling you all of this. I don't know anything about you and I'm telling you my whole life story. I just. . . I'm afraid that I'm a monster. At least Dexter only killed people who were bad. Missandei didn't deserve to die. She wanted to be a doctor or something. She could have saved people for a living and I killed her. Mrs. Baratheon didn't deserve to die either. She was a shitty mom, but she could have gotten better at it. I could have called for an ambulance and gotten her help and maybe she would have lived and spent the rest of her life trying to be better.”

And then she asks “Why did you want the Baratheons dead?”

I don't know how to answer a question that isn't yes or no. I wish that I can speak now, too. To tell her that I don't know who Dexter or Missandei are but I love her exactly the way she is. I want to tell her that my mother also died the day I was born and that it messed me up, too. If she hadn't died, I think I would still be with her. Daenerys wouldn't be the first woman I ever loved. My mother would, and Daenerys would be the second. 

I shake my head, because it's all I can think of to do. 

“What does that mean?” she asks. “You didn't want them dead?”

Another shake. 

“Why would you kill them if you didn't want them dead?”

Another shake. 

“You didn't kill them?”

Shake. 

She pauses, looking at my concealed face with confusion etched on her features. Knitted brows, parted lips. Then, she asks “If you didn't kill them, who did?”

Another question I don't know how to answer.

“Are they here? Like, are they still on the island, like you?”

I shake my head, and now I wish I could speak just so that I can stop shaking my head so much. 

“But, you've killed people, right?”

Deciding to tell the truth, I shake my head once more.

Her expression loses it's confusion, turning sorrowful again, hands back in her pockets. “You're not like me, then.”

My chin falls and I'm looking at my shoes now. 

“But, you're the one who got rid of the bodies, right?” she asks. “You were the one who cleaned everything up?”

This time, I get to nod, and I hope that the truth will make her happy this time. 

Daenerys stays silent for a bit, chewing on her bottom lip and watching my face like she can see through the mask. When she does speak again, it's hesitant, like she is the one afraid of scaring me. “Would you do it again? For me?”

I nod again. I did it the first time for her. I would do anything for her. I used to do anything for Ramsay. I feared the whole world and he protected me from it. Dealing with him was easier than dealing with the whole world at once. I will do anything for Daenerys because I don't fear her, and because she makes the world seem less scary. And because she asked me. Ramsay only ever instructed me. 

“I figure I'll be going to prison sooner or later. I'd hate for my brother to still be alive when that happens. Do you trust me?”

Again, I nod.

“I trust you, too. I don't know why. I mean, you won't even show me your face. Maybe I am brainless.”

She turns away from me then, back to looking out at the sea. 

Even though I'd been practicing not wearing my mask, I'm not sure I'm ready to actually show another person my face. Even her. I thought that I was ready to give her anything, but standing so close to her, I need my mask more than ever, to protect me from her heat on this cold night. But, I can give her something. I'll give her something now, and another something later. I can keep giving her somethings because eventually every something will equal everything and I'll have fulfilled my purpose. 

I remove my glove. The glove of my right hand. It's the hand I used to write with when I was younger, but now I just use it to scrub floors and doorknobs. It's the hand Daenerys had taken into hers not long ago and nearly melted the skin right off of my wrist. 

With my hand now bare to the world, I step toward her, my shoes squishing into the moist sand, creating enough of a sound that it makes Daenerys turn back around. Her arms are crossed. If not, I think I may have even be able to slide my fingers against her palm and lift her hand between us, just as she had done those few nights ago to me. Instead, I simply offer my hand to her. A gift. Palm facing up, fingers open. Her eyes stared down at it for a moment before she uncurled her arms and brought both of her porcelain hands to mine. 

I hold in my wince as I feel her skin against me. I force myself to remain still. Her eyes avert upward, looking up at my concealed face and even though her eyes cannot meet mine, her warmth does and I'm sweaty now. My body and my eyes. 

Her fingers graze over my palm and the back of my hand. Little needles stabbing at my skin, but the pain is intoxicating. She brings my hand up and soon, she holds my palm against her cheek. Pale, but red hot. The tips of my fingers touch her silver hair, sparkling under the light of the stars. My thumb rests between her nose and the corner of her eye.

“This is where he hits me,” she whispers, and I can tell that her eyes are sweating too. “This is where a mother is supposed to kiss her daughter, but I killed my mother, so instead of kisses, I get hit. I would get so upset after, when I was a kid, because I never thought I deserved it, but now I see that I do. We all get what we deserve. Tomorrow night, my brother will finally get what he deserves.”


	6. Chapter 6

**DAENERYS**

I wake up late the next morning, but I am up before Viserys. The sun is already in the middle of the sky when I make breakfast for myself. Nutella on toaster waffles with a mug of hot chocolate. I eat outside on the back deck while I doodle in my sketchbook. I like to draw him, Jon Snow, and I find myself shading in a nondescript human figure with black pencil in every one of my sketches. Even the ones of Missandei. I wish that he had been there for me then, to clean up the mess I'd made. But, perhaps if I'd known him before, I never would have killed Missandei. If he could make it through life without having ever killed anyone, maybe I could have too. But, it was too late for me now. Lives are like chips, I guess. You can never take just one. Or two. 

The back door slides open and I expect to see Viserys walk through, but instead of my tall, thin-faced brother, it's that young woman he'd brought home with him last night. I think her name is Dora or something like that. Dori maybe. Some Disney sounding name with a trailer trash look. A generic brunette with a small waist and teeth just crooked enough to be considered endearing. Her hands clutch a brown throw blanket around her probably-naked body and her thin hair is tangled and hanging over her eyes, squinting under the mid-day light. She looks like shit. Hung over, I assume. 

“Do you have any coffee?” she asks me in a small, scratchy voice. 

“No.”

“Fuuuuuck,” she replies, drawing out the word for dramatics. After a minute of her swaying on her feet, she plops down beside me on the outdoor sofa, bringing her legs up under the blanket. “You're the sister, right?”

“Yeah, we met last night.”

“Did we? Shit, I was real fucked up last night.”

“You look real fucked up right now.”

“I wish.” An arm erects from inside the blanket and I feel her fingers in my hair. “So this hair color is actually natural, huh? Thought Viserys was pulling my leg.”

I swat her hand away, wishing I had a knife handy to separate it from her wrist. I'll have to take another shower to wash off the residue of whatever disgusting places her hand had been last night. She simply laughs at my rudeness. 

“What's that?” She asks, leaning against me like we're old friends and peering down at my sketchbook. I can hear the cringe in her voice and wonder if she can hear the cringe in my soul. “That's creepy. Why would you want to draw something so disturbing? And in a place as beautiful as this one.”

Closing my sketch book, I restrain myself from jabbing my pencil through her eye and say “You should probably leave. Viserys isn't so much fun when he's not high.”

Doing the opposite, Dora – or whatever – leans back with a relaxed sigh, closing her eyes like she's going to bask in the sun for a while. “I never got along with my brother either. He saw me as a disappointment, too. I also dropped out of school, you know.”

I turn, lifting my knee onto the seat so that I am facing her, staring down at her fiercely. “But I'm guessing you dropped out of school because you're a dumb ass, trailer trash junky, whereas I left school because my dorm mate died. I'm bereft.” 

Her eyes open but her composure never falters. The way the corner of her mouth raises as she side glances at me, I feel as though she sees right through me and it only enrages me further. 

“You're too pretty to be so judgmental. Not quite pretty enough to be such a bitch,” she says and then her hand finds it's way back to my hair, fingers twisting into the waves. “You should come to this party with us today. Have some fun. Get high. Get laid. Most of the guys there will be major pricks, but I'll find you a decent one. Someone rich, although I guess you aren't hurting for cash.”

“I'm not interested in having fun or getting high or getting laid.”

“Not interested in getting laid? Or not interested in getting laid by a guy?” Her hand falls from my hair to graze the back of her hand down my arm. Her eyes are glassy and I find it hard to believe she isn't still tripping. “Your skin is so smooth. Like a baby. You must eat, like, really healthy.”

Forcing my expression to soften, I take a breath and ask in a calmer tone “Are you coming back here after the party?”

“I don't know. Probably. I don't really have any place to stay right now.”

“I hope you do. Maybe we can hang out.”

I see her crooked teeth when she smiles wider. “See. I knew you were alright. You're just not used to other girls being nice to you. They're probably all too jealous of you. I know what that's like.”

The sliding door had opened while she spoke and Viserys's voice sounded as soon as he stepped out on the deck, dressed only in his jeans, a silver necklace hanging from around his neck.

“Jealous? Why would anyone be jealous of my sister?” he asks.

“Be nice,” Dora tells him like she's our mother. “I like her. We're going to be friends.”

As Viserys unscrews the bullet shaped pedant from his necklace, Dora hops off of the sofa with a newfound vigor and skips up to him. 

“Well, be careful, Doreah” he warns as he offers her a snort of the white powder hidden inside the pendant. “Last girl who tried to be her friend ended up with a hunting knife in her chest.”

My eyebrows furrowed at him. “How do you know it was a hunting knife?”

“You think she's going to kill me?” asks his girlfriend – Doreah, apparently – wearing a playful smile as she wipes her nose with the back of her disgusting hand. 

“Maybe,” Viserys answers, pouring a tiny mound of cocaine onto his even more disgusting hand. He snorts it up in the same manner Doreah had, then matches her smile. “If I don't kill you first.”

They went inside and started fucking on the kitchen island so I stayed out on the deck. They'd left the sliding door open, probably intentionally, so that every moan and whimper and every slap of his hips against her ass filled my ears unimpeded. It makes me sick. So sick I think I will throw up, but I never leave the sofa when I could so easily just walk down to the beach and avoid them until they leave the house for the rest of the afternoon. Part of me wants to hear it. As strange as it is to admit, I am still innocent in some ways. One of which being that I'm a virgin. Guys have tried. A couple girls at my boarding high school had tried. But I refused everyone. 

I think I want to stop refusing now.

* * * * *

After my brother and his new friend had gone off to have their fun, I went about setting up for my own. Planning it all in my head was fun in and of itself. Doing it while they sleep would be easiest, but it wouldn't make for much of a memory to reminisce on in the future. I'll need them to be awake. Even though I'd only just met Doreah, I know enough about her to know she'll be easy to kill. I'll seduce her – or, let her think she is seducing me – because she wants to have sex with me just like Viserys does. It would be too risky to try killing them together. I'll have to separate them at some point. Kill one where the other can't hear and then go after them. 

I think about drugging Viserys, killing Doreah, and then killing him once he wakes up, but he'll already be so doped up that anything extra may just kill him before I get the chance and that would just be a waste. Finally, I decide that the manner in which I will kill them will rely on what they do when they come back tonight.

In my head, I make a list of places I cannot kill them. Beds. Couches. Rugs, if I can avoid it. The most ideal locations would be the kitchen and the bathrooms, simply because they will be easiest to clean.

The bathroom. Doreah will die in the bathroom. Girls are always going to the bathroom together. 

The kitchen. Viserys. I'll sit up on the kitchen island like Doreah did today and when he stands between my legs, I'll drive the Valyrian steel dagger into his gut. Not his heart. I'll want to watch him die slowly. Let him choke on his own blood while I watch. Let his eyes water while they stare up at me and wonder how I could have done such a thing. “Have fun fucking yourself in hell,” I could tell him, but he doesn't believe in hell. Men who don't care if they're going to hell never really believe in it. 

For hours I sit in nervous excitement until their return, and I am pleased to see them both return. I'm on the couch, watching national news with the volume turned down low, sketching again in my notebook, the scene of two disturbed lovers screwing on the kitchen island. Me and him – Jon Snow. I hadn't shaded in the blackness of his disguise yet, though, and when Viserys looks at the image over my shoulder, he breathes tequila breath against my ear and says “Been thinking about me, sis?”

Even though my plan relies on him thinking I do want to have sex with him, in that moment, my plan is eclipsed by my general disgust and hatred for him. I lean away from him quickly, my hand pushing his face from my vicinity, but I know I have gone too far by nearly slapping him. His face scrunches in anger and his hand reaches out to my neck, squeezing until I can't breathe and holds me down against the couch cushions. He picks up the lamp from the end table and lifts it like he is going to hit me with it. I think he is going to kill me and that would be the end of everything, but instead, he just glowers and seethes out a warning while I claw at his hands. “If you weren't my sister, I'd bash your fucking head in right now, but if you ever do that again, I won't be so forgiving.” 

With that, he releases me and I gasp and cough. I used to cry when he did things like this, but not tonight, because tonight he's going to be the one dying. Not me.

“Quit messing around over there!” I hear Doreah call out from the kitchen. “Baby, I'm hungry. What do you want to eat?”

I stay lying on the couch while they eat the food I bought with a credit card Viserys now keeps in his wallet. Eventually, Viserys makes a comment about being exhausted and Doreah suggests he go to bed and she'll meet him later. She says she wants to hang out with his little sister and she says this like I'm a child who desperately needs a friend. I'll use that to my advantage. 

She sits beside me on the living room sofa and immediately, her hand goes into my hair. I should have tied it up, but maybe I can use this to my advantage as well. 

“Men are all pricks,” she tells me in an oddly sweet voice, alcohol on her breath, but she seems relatively in her right mind. “He didn't scare you, did he?”

“What do you see in him?” I ask.

“Like I said, all men are pricks. You just have to find the prick who gives you the things you need.”

“Drugs?”

“I do like drugs,” she chuckles. 

“Well he bought them with my money.”

That makes her smirk like she did earlier and her fingers trail from my hair to my neck where Viserys had held me down. “If you had a dick I might just dump him for you then.”

“I thought you liked girls,” I say with genuine confusion. 

“I like anyone who can make me cum, but I love dick.” More longingly, she adds “I love your hair. I wish I had hair like yours. My hair is shit.”

For a few moments, I chew my bottom lip to force myself not to show how excited I am. “Maybe you can do my hair for me. I never know what to do with it. My dorm mate used to braid it sometimes when she was bored.”

“I'm no good at doing hair.” 

I'm visibly disappointed. It would have been a great way to lure her into the bathroom with me. Maybe I shouldn't have left the dagger on the guest bathroom counter, hidden under a folded towel. Too optimistic. But I need to think of something fast because Doreah is inching closer and closer to me and I don't want to actually have sex with her. My plan B is just to keep her talking. 

“So you don't love my brother?” I ask. 

Laughing, she answers “He's not exactly the kind of man someone loves.”

“Why would you sleep with someone you don't love?”

Her eyebrow goes up. “If I only ever slept with people I loved I'd never have sex.”

It made me mad and oddly insecure that she found my question so strange. I once thought I'd never love anyone and I was content to live a life of celibacy because of it.

“Wait,” she says, leaning so close to me I can see the gold flecks in her brown eyes, reminding me yet again of the dagger hidden in the bathroom. “Are you a virgin?”

I've never felt shame for being a virgin. The shame I felt came from the reason why. 

“Yes,” I answer quietly. “But only because I've never wanted to sleep with someone before. The thought of it sickened me for the longest time. I never understood how people could become aroused just by the existence of other people.”

“You mean you've never been turned on by anyone else?”

I shake my head. “Well. . . In a way, I suppose. Only in the abstract. I get turned on when I think about st – penetrating another person. Getting inside them. Feeling their heart race until it abruptly drops. Watching the warm wetness ooze out of them as I pull out. Touching it and bringing it to my mouth. Tasting it. That's what's always turned me on. Just that. It was never about wanting another person, it was just about wanting that feeling. Until now. Now. . .” I take a breath. “I've never really felt like this before.”

Her breath is hot against my lips and when she kisses me, I close my eyes and imagine it's him – Jon, and I actually am aroused. I imagine him getting inside of me, but not with a blade. 

“I want you to penetrate me,” Doreah breathes, waking me from my fantasy. My eyes open and she's smiling. I feel her hand between my legs, fingers pressing against the seem of my jeans where I have grown hot and wanting for Jon, but it's her that I want as well. In the bathroom.

“What are you going to do it with, though?” she inquires. “Where do you hide your cock, Daenerys?”

The corner of my mouth raises in a smirk because I've found another in. 

“Come with me. I'll show you.”

* * * * *

It takes me minutes. Easier than I expected and even more satisfying. I let her kiss me some more, until she takes her shirt off. It's better when their shirts are off, I discover. I watch her flesh separate as I drive the dagger deeper and deeper into her chest and watch the redness flow straight from the wound. I push her into the tub before pulling out the blade and buckets of her blood slide straight down the drain. 

After cleaning off the dagger and brushing the taste of her lipstick from my teeth with Colgate, I leave the bathroom, anxious to move onto the second half of my mission. I haven't touched myself yet and I am looking forward to doing so over Viserys's dead body. Unless Jon comes in, then maybe I can finally have real sex with a man. I don't care that I've never seen his face. I've seen thousands upon thousands of faces and never cared about one of them. The only people I've ever cared for, were those whose faces I cannot see. Jon's and my mother's.

My legs are burning and I need Viserys awake now, but I don't want to kill him in bed because a mattress will be hell to clean and I don't want to make Jon's job more difficult. Bound and determined, I go into the living room, put on Dad's Beach Boys album, and crank the volume up so loud I can feel the instruments like they are strumming against my brain. 

It's past midnight. Jon will be here soon if he isn't already. 

I quickly find Doreah's purse and stash it someplace where Viserys won't see it, then slide the cleaned dagger into my own purse. I rest mine on the kitchen counter, unzipped so that I'll have easy access to it. 

I only have to wait a minute before Viserys appears from the hallway, hair a mess and eyes puffy from an interrupted sleep. He's wearing only his boxers, which would normally gross me out, but now I'm glad because now I know how much better it is to stab someone who is shirtless. He marches straight over to the record player and pulls the record from it so carelessly it scratches, then flings the record against the window where it bounces to the floor. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks, too bewildered to be enraged. “And where is Doreah?”

“She left.”

“What?”

“She left. She got a call and it sounded urgent. She said she had to go, so she left.”

Shaking his head, Viserys grumbles something unkind under his breath and rubs at one of his sleepy eyes. Meanwhile, I pull myself up onto the counter and try to look seductive. I should have worn something sexy, but I don't own anything sexy. Viserys doesn't notice. He doesn't even look at me. He walks around the coffee table and drops onto the sofa, head back, and I wonder if he's going to just fall back asleep right there on the couch. 

I'm too impatient. I must adapt. The couch will have to do.

* * * * *

**JON**

_“There are words we both could say, but don't talk. Put your head on my shoulder.”_

The sound draws me ever closer, the same song from that first night I came to this house.

_“Don't talk. Take my hand and let me hear your heartbeat.”_

It cuts off as I approach the back deck and I'm grateful for that. Too loud. But there is a banging sound that immediately follows and I worry that something bad is happening. Banging sounds are never good. It's the sound of things breaking. My step-mom used to break things if the house wasn't clean enough. My foster parents would break things when I talked back. Ramsay would break things when I didn't do what he said. 

I hear yelling. The sliding door is open half way. The glow onto the back deck is bright and yellow. Many lights are on. I hide among the trees like I usually do and I watch, but it isn't just her – Daenerys – that I see. It's a man. The one who had yelled. Scarcely dressed, body like a white blade of grass, tall and thin and swaying slightly as he crosses the living room to sit on the brown leather sofa. Easier to clean than cloth. White hair, like hers, but whereas on Daenerys it looks magical, on him it appears sickly. This is the brother. The one who hurts her. The one whose blood I will clean off of that brown leather sofa tonight. 

The view is so clear it's like a movie before my eyes, like when I watch Ramsay and Theon and Gendry do what they do, but this is different. Daenerys is like a snake, sliding off of the kitchen counter. She picks up her fancy bag and sets it on the long, slender table behind the sofa, positioning it right behind her brother's head, lulled back like he's drifting off to sleep. 

Daenerys speaks. I hear her voice like she's talking the words right into my ear. 

“Remember when I was eight years old and you were supposed to watch me after school, but instead you took me to one of your friends' houses to play video games?”

After a moment, the glade of grass stirs. “Um. . . No?” he mutters, eyes still shut. 

Daenerys walks with a straight back, around the sofa and the adjacent chair until she is picking up a large black disk – a record – from the floor. “Sure you remember. It's the reason Dad sent you to military school, isn't it?” She went up to a box under the flat screen and put the record inside of it. The music sounds again, but this time very faint and a little scratchy. A different song, but I liked it. 

When she is sitting atop the coffee table, right across from her brother, she leans her elbows on her knees and says “I played handball against the wall of the garage in the back yard for hours by myself until you called me into the house. No one else was home. Just us and your pimply friends. Three of them. Maybe four. I can't remember exactly, since I was so young. What I do remember is --”

“Jesus, Dany. Your voice is giving me a headache.”

I think his eyes are open now, but I can't tell. Not until Daenerys stands, staring down at him, but not with anger. More like acceptance. Like she is forgiving her brother for what he'd done and was going to absolve him of his sins. But sins like his never go away, and she knows that. 

“I remember you telling me to put my hands on the back of the couch – You telling me to bend over.” She bends over so that her nose is mere inches from her brothers, planting her hands on the back frame of the sofa on either side of his head.

This doesn't sit well with me. It's too dangerous. She's going too slow. Be fast. Be scary. Be unpredictable. That's how Ramsay does it. Daenerys is allowing him too much time to realize what she is going to do. She'll be a lovely lady bug trying to topple that blade of grass and I'm not sure she'll be able to do it. 

Before I even register what my feet are doing, I am crossing the threshold into the house. Just a shadow in the brightly lit room. When Daenerys looks up at me, her smile is sweetness for my eyes and I know that no matter what happens, I will protect her. 

“Do you remember letting your friend lift up my skirt --”

“I never told him to do anything!” her brother interjects, hurting my ears, but Daenerys shushes him into submission. 

“I never said you told him to do it. But you let him. You let him lift up my skirt and press himself against me. You all laughed while he did it and I did too, because I thought it was a game. A game you finally let me play. I didn't even know what he was doing and I told myself that it didn't really matter precisely because I didn't know what he was doing. But you knew what he was doing.”

“Yeah and I went to fucking boot camp because you couldn't keep your stupid mouth shut, so why are you still hung up on it?” His voice is wavy, quiet, turning his head away like Daenerys stinks even though I know she doesn't. 

Now, I know what she's doing. It's what step-parents do to step-children. It's what foster-parents do to foster-children. It's what Ramsay does. She's making him too afraid to look at her. Too afraid to be his true self.

“That's not why Dad sent you away,” She says and then her knees slide onto the sofa, pressing into the cushions on either side of her brother's hips. Trapping him with something he wants, like silence or a mask. “He sent you away because he knew that you wished it had been you pressing up behind me. You wanted me even then. You've always wanted me. But you could never have me. Because of Dad. The only person you're afraid of.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” He's sighing and leaning back, sinking into the sofa, but even from the back of him, I can tell he isn't relaxed. Just pretending. It gives Daenerys room to get closer to him. 

It's confusing and part of me wants to run away, but then I see her hand inch from the couch to the bag behind her brother's head. 

“I lied to you.” She's whispering now, because maybe she doesn't want me to hear, but I hear everything and part of me feels guilty. “I sent Doreah away. I wanted to give you the opportunity to finally have what you want.”

“What makes you think you're that special?”

I see the gold and glistening steel of the dagger as she draws it from her bag, but she's slow still, keeping it behind his head. She leans in close to his ear and whispers something, but her eyes are on me and I'm trying not too breathe too loud.

And then her eyes roll and a gasp leaves her lips because her brother's long fingers have snatched her neck. It causes her to lean back and him forward and I wonder if this is when he'll over power her, but there is still a smile playing on her mouth. Still, I jolt forward, not sure what I'm going to do but knowing I must do something. Before I can reach my hands out to hold him down, though, Daenerys swishes the dagger around his head and in a moment my ears fill with the sound of steel piercing flesh and muscle. 

A gasp from the brother, hand dropping from his sisters throat. A gasp from Daenerys, burying the dagger deep inside the center of his chest with her whole body. A gasp from me, almost loud enough to be audible. 

I wish I could see her pull the dagger out. The scent of blood is so strong I can almost taste metal in my mouth.

The record player is all the keeps the silence from overwhelming the room as life leaves her brother. Daenerys's eyes are closed and she drops her forehead to his shoulder. At first I think she is crying, but I soon recognize the movement of her right shoulder and know that she's touching herself. Her other hand outstretches over the back of the sofa, reaching out to me and she may as well have fire streaming from her finger tips the way I'm sweating under my clothes. 

My heart races. Her body trembles. Her fingers dance in the air, waiting for a partner. Me. 

I peel my glove off and as soon as my cold, wet hand slides into her palm, her hot fingers are squeezing me tight. Binding me. Electric shocks jolt up my arm and down my spine. Our hands rest together on the top of the table separating me and the sofa. I find my own eyes drifting shut, ears focusing on the sounds of her whimpers, my nerves focusing on the feel of her warm, moist skin, and soon I find my other hand connecting with my erection, bulging and making my jeans tight. 

Pressing. Rubbing. I shiver, but I'm so hot. Because of her. And she's whimpering. Moaning. Because of me? 

No. Because of him. Because he's dead and she killed him. His life is hers now. I have no lives. But I have her hand. 

I bite my lip so hard I taste blood, but I don't make a sound when I cum. Sticky inside my pants. Not that Daenerys would have heard me if I had made a sound. She makes enough sounds for two people. I like them more than the music. 

When her sounds stop, my eyes open and I see into hers. Big and blue. They move to her brother. Dead. And her lips part, eyebrows furrow. Sad. 

“I really did it,” she breathes. “I killed my own brother.”

Hand leaving mine, my skin feels frozen without her now. I had grown too accustomed to her heat and I should have known better. I look down at my hand, bare to the bright lights in the room and it looks white. Diseased. Veiny and blue around the nails. My head floods and I start to shake. I need my glove, but I dropped it. I need it. I pick it up and I shove my hand into it, but I can't zip it because I'm shaking too much. 

She says my name. “Jon.” And I nearly fall over. Her eyes are back on me. Watching. She sees me. I don't know how because I'm wearing my mask, but I know she can see me. She has my life too. I'm not dead, but she has me still. But maybe I am dead. I used to always want to be dead. Too afraid to kill. She's not. She's killed me. I am already hers.

“Jon.” She says it again. She is standing. She is moving around the sofa and coming up beside me. Her hands touch my arm. 

Scorching. Melting. I'm jumping away from her.

The bathroom. It's the only safe place. First door on the left down the hallway. I've seen it when I walk that way to watch her at night. 

Running.

Slamming. 

Locking. 

Safe. 

I turn the light on and pull my mask off. My skin is greasy and pale but my cheeks are red. My hair is wet, sticking to the side of my face and the back of my neck. I turn on the sink and splash water on my face to wash away all of the bad feelings. 

“Not dead,” I mouth, glowering at myself in the mirror and slowly, I calm. I'm not dead. No one has killed me. Not my step-mom. Not my foster parents. Not those kids in the alleyway, laughing at me, pushing me, kicking me, cutting me. Not Ramsay. Not Daenerys. 

As my mind slows, it sharpens and I notice in the mirror all the red on the floor by the bathtub. Blood. I pull back the shower curtain. A girl. Dead. 

There is a soft knocking on the door, but it sounds like cannonballs in my head. She's mad at me. I was supposed to be there for her and protect her, but I ran away, hiding in the bathroom like a coward. If she couldn't see me before, she sees me now. Just the way Ramsay does. The way my step-mom did, and my foster parents. Worthless.

“I'm sorry,” I hear her say, so quiet I almost miss it over the thumping of my heartbeat in my ears. 

I'm sorry? 

I look at the door like it's her. She says it again. 

“I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me.” Louder, but sadder, voice dripping with something familiar. I hear it in my own voice. The one inside my head. “I didn't even need to kill her. I just wanted to. I have a problem. A disease, I think. But I won't do it anymore. I promise. I won't kill anyone anymore. I don't want to be a monster, Jon. I'm sorry. Please don't hate me.”

Hate her? Hate is the opposite of how I feel for her. And how could she possibly be a monster? Monsters don't apologize to people. No one has ever apologized to me before. 

My feet move toward the door and before I know it, I'm opening it, flooding light into the dark hallway. Daenerys sits on the floor, back against the opposite wall, eyes cast down to her knees that are pulled up against her chest. I don't even realize that I hadn't put my mask back on until I notice how easily my nostrils fill with her scent. Flowers and sunshine. Does warmth have a smell?

* * * * *

**DAENERYS**

His footsteps are silent, but when his shoes come into view in front of me, I tilt my head up and through my tear-filled eyes I notice that he isn't wearing the black mask I've grown so accustomed to. He is no longer a faceless man. He has a face, pale with dark stubble and bags under his eyes. Thin, pink scars blemish his forehead and cheek. His hair is black and curly, long enough to push behind an ear and fall down his neck. He isn't a shadow anymore. Just a man. A young man. Jon Snow. 

Sniffling and blinking a couple of tears free from my eyelids, I drop my hand to the floor and feel for the bloody dagger resting beside me. When my fingers are wrapped around the golden handle, I lift the heavy thing and hold it out. 

“You should kill me,” I tell him, my voice so soft and hoarse I almost don't recognize it. “I won't be able to do it myself. Don't worry, though. It's not really murder, because you're killing someone who needs to die. A monster.”

Still he remains silent, blinking down at me. After a few moments I feel self conscious, but then he stoops, kneeling down on his knees before me. His gloved fingers peel the dagger from my own hand. 

Another tear falls. 

“Jon,” I breathe. 

His eyes are so dark, but bright at the same time. Like big, gray moons leading me out to sea. His lips part, but still, he says nothing. 

“I'm glad you got to see me for who I really am. I just wish I could have seen more of you.” 

I raise my hand slowly, tentatively, up to his face. He flinches when my fingers get close, but I expect that and pause for a moment before finally connecting my hand with his cheek. Cold and clammy, but something about it is soothing and calms my hyper nerves. His eyes squeeze shut and I know he is struggling, but I take a few liberties still. Soft and careful. My thumb grazing his cheekbone, my finger tips running through the short hairs on his jaw.

Then, I decide to take another liberty. I move as gracefully as possible, up onto my own knees, close enough to feel the point of the dagger poking into my belly. Jon's eyes open and even though he looks startled to see me so close to him, he holds still while I lean in even closer. 

I hold my breath and gently press my lips against his, expecting them to be as cold as the rest of him, but they're warm, and soft, so I hold the kiss for a little longer before pulling away.

“It's okay,” I whisper, dropping my hand from his cheek to where his fingers hold the dagger. I curl my fingers around his and lift his hand until the point of the dagger is at the center of my chest. “I want you to do it. I know that you like me, but people like me don't deserve to be alive.”

He swallows hard. Something I actually hear. I shut my eyes and try to relax. Don't want to die a coward. But the point against my chest never digs any further into me and after a few long moments, the sharpness disappears from me all together. 

When my eyes open back up, Jon is standing and the dagger is lying on the floor once more. He turns back into the bathroom and retrieves his mask, pulling it back onto his head, turning himself back into a shadow. And then he's gone. Walking away until he is out the back door. 

Wrapping my arms around myself, I stand in the threshold of the hallway and cry again because this is worse. I would rather die than be left here alone with my brother still bleeding out on the couch and his girlfriend already turning sour in the bathtub. I don't know what to do now because I really don't think I have what it takes to take my own life. I don't think I have what it takes to live on the run by myself either, though.

Just as the last of my pieces start to break down, the shadow returns, coming back in the back door, but this time he is carrying a large, black duffel bag that he sets on the floor. From it, he pulls out a thick roll of plastic. 

“Jon, you don't have to,” I say.

He stands up straight and looks at me for a long moment before stepping his silent steps over to me. His gloved hand slides into mine and he leads me down the hall and he doesn't let go of my hand until we're in the master bedroom. After another lingering look, he leaves me there, closing the door behind him. I sense him move back into the living room. 

While he is silent, the cleaning process is not, and I stay awake listening to him move the bodies and clean up the house for as long as I can until I drift off to sleep slumped on the floor, head resting against the door.


	7. Chapter 7

**JON**

Among the trees the light of the sun isn't so harsh and I am actually able to have my mask off while I fill in the holes I'd dug at dawn, a few yards from where the couple from the list were buried. When I finish tamping down the soil to make it look as undisturbed as possible, I find I'm not looking forward to the walk back across the clearing to the farm house. Like walking through fire. 

For a while I sit with what I've done. One. Two. Three. Four. I count the number of graves in this garden of bones before me. I may not have killed any of them, but the graves belong to me. A collection. I always wanted to have a collection but I never liked baseball cards or stamps or coins. I like my graves, though. Four rectangular plots, each one representing my love for Daenerys. I would dig a thousand more if she needed me to. She wouldn't even have to ask. 

I take off my gloves. Somehow my hands are still dirty. Black under my nails. 

From my back pocket I pull out a folded sheet of thick paper. _“Jon Snow”_ it says. My name, written by her hand. I unfold it and stare at the drawing. So much more beautiful in the day time. The sand, the sea, the stars and the moon in a black sky. She's drawn herself in this picture. Just a small, featureless outline, standing on the beach like Daenerys had been the other night, shaded in the color of gold. 

It may have been an hour that I sat there staring at the drawing like it was a never before seen Picasso, but eventually, I fold it back up and make the grueling trip across the field under the bright sunlight until I am safe inside the cottage. 

* * * * *

**DAENERYS**

Buzz.

Buzz.

Buzz.

I wake up groggy and bleary-eyed on the floor of the master bedroom, a crick in my neck and a sore hip. The world doesn't seem real yet, like I'm stuck in a dreamland purgatory. It takes me a few seconds to remember who I am and why I've awoken so suddenly. 

Buzz. 

Buzz. 

Loud and harsh as Viserys's phone vibrates against the wood of the bedside table.

By the time I manage to crawl across the room and take my brother's iPhone in my hand, the vibrations have ceased and a small notification box flashes over the lock screen reading “missed call.” I nearly drop the phone in a perplexed panic because on first glance it looks like the name of the caller is Doreah and I could have sworn I killed her, but then I blink a couple of times and read the name again. “Daario.” I haven't any idea who that is, but can only guess it is someone Viserys owes money to, or another whore. 

When I venture out of the bedroom, I half expect to feel some sinister, ghostly presence around me. Viserys sticking around to haunt me from the afterlife, but I feel absolutely nothing. Everything is just the same as when I'd woken up the morning before. Better actually, because I am alone.

The guest bathroom is spotless. Cleaner than it had been before it became a crime scene. I was more nervous about the living room, though. I never should have killed Viserys on the sofa. I should have been more patient and waited until I could get him into the kitchen. But, when I step out of the hallway, nothing is amiss. No body, no blood, not even the vaguest sense of death becomes this room. Absolutely everything is as it should be.

On the coffee table lays the Valyrian steel dagger, pristine and shimmering in the late morning light. I pick it up. Smile. Dance a little. I want to cook spaghetti and listen to music, but I desperately need to bathe. I wish Jon were here. He could watch me. 

I walk with a sway back through the master bedroom and into the bathroom, humming “God Only Knows” as I turn on the bath faucet and watch the tub slowly fill. Soon I stand and turn to undress in front of the mirror, but the sight of myself drains all of the contentment from my body.

Blood. Staining my jeans and the front of my white sweater. My hair is a mess of tangles and what little makeup I'd been wearing yesterday is smudged around my eyes. I look like hell. Like death. Like a third person died last night. Me. 

Never again, I tell myself. Viserys was the last. 

* * * * *

My brother's phone rings again while I'm in the bath. I could hear it buzzing again. I check once I'm dried off to see it was from the same person – Daario. In fact, this Daario person calls again just a few hours later. Then again as night falls. I don't know how many times Daario calls after that because after my spaghetti dinner, I walk down to the beach and chuck the phone in the water. 

With the bed sheets changed and Viserys's smell vacuumed and fabreezed out of the master bedroom, I am able to relax again. A new me, I think as I stretch out under the covers. A new Daenerys Targaryen. Not the one everyone knew at school or at home, but not the one who lusts for killing either. Everything takes compromise and that is what I'll do. I will find a way to be my true self while not succumbing to my basic urges. I think that if I could be with Jon, I could manage it. People with other, more socially acceptable addictions are always saying that their loved ones are their strength to overcome. I don't have any loved ones. Mom's dead. My brother is dead. I'm not sure if I've ever really loved my father. I'm not sure if I've ever loved anyone, but I think I might love Jon.

This time, I really do fall asleep. 

Minutes, maybe hours later, something ice cold grazes the skin of my neck and I'm flinching awake. Everything is black in my vision, but after a few seconds they adjust and I see the pale hand that had pulled so quickly away from me, attached to the dark silhouette of the man I'd been thinking of before sleep overtook me. 

“It's okay,” I say softly.

His hand does not return to me, though. He stands like a statue just at the side of my bed. When I was a child, my biggest fear was to wake up in the middle of the night to someone standing beside my bed, staring at me. I would wet myself on purpose just because I was too terrified of who may be lurking in the dark, ready to get me on my way to the bathroom. Maybe the things in the dark were never there to hurt me. Maybe they were there to protect me. I find myself in need of more than protection, though. More than a shadowy body guard to make sure I'm safe while I sleep. 

I move away from him, scooting across the bed and turning on my side to face him. I rub the spot I had just moved from, whispering “Come here.”

It surprises me when Jon actually complies, slowly moving onto the bed and turning over to face me, masked head resting on the pillow I'd been keeping warm. My own is cold, but not as cold as Jon's hand as I slide mine into it and bring it up between us. With both hands, I hold it to my chest like it's a treasured stuffed toy.

My eyelids are heavy as I say “You don't have to leave. You could stay with me.”

He doesn't answer, but I suppose it wasn't a question but a suggestion. He doesn't stay, though. I fall asleep once more holding his hand, but awake in the morning in an empty bed. Hollow. That's how I feel. And now I might finally understand why girls are always so upset when a guy doesn't text them back. Couldn't he tell that I needed him? Perhaps he just didn't care.

I don't know what to do in this house anymore. I don't want to put on records and dance. I don't want to sit out on the deck and sketch. I don't want to drive to Main Street and shop. I'd probably slit a cashier's throat on impulse anyway. Best to stay away from other people. That was the whole point of coming here, wasn't it? But now I've become a serial killer – the kind they hunt on Criminal Minds, the kind they make docudramas about. I'm so fucked. But the feeling of being so fucking fucked just makes me want to kill more people. I'm already looking at life in prison for what I've done. May as well get a little more enjoyment out of life before I go down. 

No. No more killing. 

For an hour I am crouched in the front flower bed, fixing the garden that my dear departed brother had disturbed with the tires of his rental car. 

Shit. The rental car. I'll have to do something with that. Return it? Is that stupid? I should have read farther into those mystery novels.

My phone rings, interrupting my thoughts. It isn't a number saved into my phone, but I vaguely recognize the digits. 

“Hello?” I answer simply.

“Miss Targaryen. Hi. This is Detective Naharis.”

Shit. I'd completely forgotten about Missandei's case – that they had arrested an innocent man for her murder. My mouth is dry and I can't think of the right words to say.

Detective Naharis continues with an air of nervousness in his tone, just like the last time I'd spoken with him. “This is going to sound a bit random, but I'm wondering if your brother, Viserys, is on the island with you.”

My eyebrows furrow and my body sweats. I can't stop my genuine confusion from taking lead. “What? Why would you ask about my brother? What does he have to do with anything. He – um – isn't here. He's never been here. I haven't seen him since a very uncomfortable Thanksgiving last year when he said he was moving to California.” 

“Are you sure you haven't seen him?”

“Yes, I'm sure. What does he have to do with Missandei's case?”

“This isn't actually regarding your friend's case, Miss Targaryen.”

“I don't understand --”

“Has anyone else been to your house in the last couple of days?”

“No.”

There is a pause on the other end and I can almost hear the frustration in the detective's silence. Eventually, he says “Miss Targaryen, I have reason to believe that your brother is in danger.”

I almost laugh. “I think he'll be fine.”

“Your brother has made a lot of enemies. Enemies with a lot of resources, who would go to great lengths to cash in on a vendetta.”

“Well, he's not here.”

“I believe you, but I also believe that the people after him believe he is on Dragonstone. Listen, I think that you should get on the next ferry to Seattle. I'll pick you up when you get here.”

My hands are shaking now and my mind is racing. “Is this some sort of trick? Why are you talking to me about my brother? I have nothing to do with him. If you want my brother for something, you're going to have to find him on your own.”

“I'm trying to protect your brother. And you.”

“I don't need your protection, and Viserys is a scum bag. Who gives a crap if someone gives him what he has coming?”

“It's my job, Daenerys. I work for your father.”

At that, my body freezes and the wind nearly knocks me right over into the flowerbed. Meekly, I say “I thought you were a detective.”

“I am.” He's whispering now, but not so nervous. “But I also work for your father. That's the only reason you aren't in prison right now. You're such a good liar, Daenerys, even face to face, but not even your charm could change how blatantly obvious it was that you killed that poor girl. You'd be sitting in a jail cell right now if it weren't for me steering the evidence away from you.”

There is a stinging pain in the front of my head and my vision is hazy. “What do you want?” I croak. 

“I want to do my job. I want to keep Aerys Targaryen's children safe.”

A tear escapes my eye. My chin quivers. I'm afraid, but not of Detective Naharis, and not of someone trying to hurt me. I'm afraid of never seeing Jon again.

“I can't leave today,” I tell him. “I just can't. I'll leave first thing in the morning, though. The six o'clock ferry.”

There is another pause on his end until he forces himself to be satisfied with my response. I'm lying of course. Whether he works for my father or not, I'm not going to just walk myself into a detective's custody. Especially one that knows I'm guilty. 

* * * * *

**JON**

There is a bed in the back bedroom of the farm house. Ramsay had slept there before he left on that boat with Theon and the kid and no one had slept on it since. I'd grown so used to sleeping on floors over the years that a mattress and pillow feel suffocating now. Tonight, however, I brush the dust off the knit blankets, turn over the pillows, and rest atop it all. The linen is freezing against the side of my unmasked face as I turn onto my side. 

Blinking at the empty space in front of me, where there is room for another person to lie, I bring my un-gloved hand up to my chest and hug it tight with my other hand. My lips move, repeating the same words over and over until, finally, sound carries out of me with my breath.

“You could. . .” Another breath, “stay with me.”

My eyes feel warm and then wet. The next time I blink, the wetness streams down the corner of my eye to make the pillow wet too. I quickly grab the vacant pillow and hug it against me, shutting my eyes and pretending it smells less like mildew and dust and more like her. Daenerys. 

The next time I open my eyes, the air feels different. Time has past. I hadn't intended to fall asleep and my pulse races as I consider that horrifying possibility that I had slept the night away without visiting Daenerys. Hastily, I jump from the bed and rush outside, but breathe a sigh of relief to see that the moon is big and bright and high up in the starry sky, no hint of morning in sight. 

I take the van to Daenerys's house quickly, just in case. So quickly in fact, that I do not even realize that I have left my mask and gloves behind at the farm house until I am standing in a brightly lit living room, looking down at Daenerys as she sleeps on the newly, and thoroughly cleaned sofa. She is in black stretchy pants and a t-shirt, an opened book resting on her chest that rises and falls so evenly. So badly I wish to replace that book with my hand. My hand. That's when I notice. And looking toward the large windows, I see my reflection. I see my face. 

For the second time in only a matter of minutes, I feel as though my heart is going to explode. The light bulbs over my head feel like radioactive energy piercing my skin. I turn around, then around again, and around once more, searching for a light switch but my naked eyes aren't used to seeing things this clearly at night and it's throwing me off. 

“Jon,” her voice speaks behind me and I freeze, holding in an exhale. The sofa leather squeaks, then I hear her bare feet on the hardwood floor, padding quietly around the sofa until I feel her standing right behind me. “I'm leaving. I have to. When it got to be past one and you weren't here I was worried that I wouldn't get to see you before I go.”

Go? My eyebrows knit together as I contemplate the word. Go. Like gone. Gone like Robb. Not dead, but still very much gone forever. Sometimes, when I hadn't slept in days and my stomach was empty, I would wish that Robb had died so that he could be a ghost that follows me around like I imagine my father's might. Robb's ghost would hate the things I do just as I'm sure my father's ghost does, but at least they could keep me company in dark corners of damp rooms. Robb isn't dead, though. He is somewhere safe and pleasant, sleeping at night and doing normal things in the day like school and work and girlfriends, driving cars that weren't stolen and eating food from restaurants rather than the dumpsters behind grocery stores, watching movies with friends rather than watching strangers die but at least we both found something to enjoy out of life.

When Dad died, I was heart-broken. When Robb was taken away, I was lost. Without Daenerys, I'll be heart-broken and lost. I will have no one. Nothing. Not even Ramsay. Only ghosts.

My eyes are warm again, my cheeks wet. I let out my exhale because it hurts too much to hold it in.

“Jon,” she says again as her hand slips into mine. I don't flinch or wince. I just let it burn.

A second later she is in front of me, gripping my hand tight while raising her other to my cheek. Her thumb brushes across my skin where it's damp. I turn my head down to conceal as much of my unpleasant appearance as possible, but she breathes so softly, whispering “Don't do that. I like it when you see me.”

I lift my head and my gaze to her, trying to forget that her gaze is on me too. It's easier than I thought, because her eyes are so soft and her smile so sweet. “Will you come with me?” she asks. “We can go anywhere. Anywhere in the world. What do you think of Bermuda? I think I'm ready to be warm. No more death. Just you and me.”

My lips part and for a moment I think that the word might actually leave my throat. Yes. I don't know where Bermuda is, but I would go anywhere with Daenerys. I'm ready to be warm, too. 

When I nod, her smile brightens and I know I've made the right decision.

“We have to leave tonight. I've got the keys to the Baratheons' boat that we can take to the mainland, I'll go to the bank and get as much cash out of my accounts as I can, and then we book a flight.” She makes it sound so simple, and maybe it is. Maybe it's been simple the entire time. Just leave. “Do you have a passport?”

I nod. Roose got fake ones for all of us for when we have to leave the country on a job, though I had never actually gone on any of these international jobs since trying to board a flight with a black mask over my face would put too much attention on the group. But I still carried the thing wherever I go, because it's mine – even though it says my name is Michael Willis – and I don't have very many things that are mine. It isn't here, though. It's at the farm house, along with my mask and gloves and a few other things.

Thankfully, Daenerys asks “Do you need to get your stuff?”

Again, I nod.

* * * * *

**DAENERYS**

With the key ring I'd swiped from the Baratheons' house the night of their deaths, I unlock their boathouse and once inside, I drop my packed bag into Stannis's fishing boat. No use taking the luxury sail boat out when I'm just going to leave it at the mainland marina with the keys in the ignition, ready to be stolen. Hell, I'm hoping it'll be stolen. I suppose Jon and I could sail all the way down to Mexico, but I know a lot more about how one can die in the middle of the ocean than I do about sailing a boat, so I'm not going to take the risk.

I turn the key in the ignition to check the fuel level. Good to go. I remove the keys and turn to head back to the house when something stops me, a force pulling me back to my luggage. As I tentatively kneel and unzip the bag, it's as if I hadn't even packed it myself and I was discovering the contents for the first time. A rolled up hoodie sits atop the rest of my folded clothes and as I unfurl it, my eyes catch the glint of steel and the glimmer of gold. 

Valyrian steel. That was what Mrs. Baratheon had called it in her disinterested, unworthy tone. I had fled to this island seeking asylum from my temptations, only to be seduced by Valyrian steel. I could kill every single human being on Earth with this blade, until only Jon and I remain.

My feet carry me up to the Baratheon house before my own. They take me through the back door and across the main room until stopping me in front of the lavish hearth, the center piece of the living room, but missing a crucial element. My hands lift my beloved dagger up to perch it on it's rightful place in the iron stand. I let out a sigh, closing my eyes and letting every one of the weapon's victims run through my mind. A prayer of sorts. A goodbye. 

“No more death,” I promise myself. 

The walk back home seems to last forever. With every step I take away from the dagger, the harder I must force myself to take the next. I could take the thing to a pawn shop in Seattle and skip the bank all together, I tell myself, but that is just an excuse. An excuse to hold onto it just a bit longer until I come up with another excuse to hold on to it for longer still. 

The urge fades as I get back home. I occupy my mind by walking through the house, re-covering the furniture with the same linens I'd found them covered with upon arriving here just a couple of weeks ago. I start in the master bedroom, then work my way back into the living room.

When I see a figure in all black standing just within the back door, I jump, dropping the bundle of sheets from my hands. Black clothes, black gloves, black mask. 

“You scared me,” I say, chuckling at myself for being startled. I should be used to this by now – I was expecting Jon back soon after all – but there is still a lingering uneasiness in my belly because, even though he is standing right in front of me, I don't feel Jon Snow in this room.

He takes a step toward me, the sole of his shoe sticking on the wood floor just enough to make a sound. A sound? My eyes turn down. Black boots with rubber soles. That's not –

Scraping at the front door – no, at the lock – causes my head to spin and my eyes to widen because in that split second I finally understand that the situation around me is all wrong. 

Spinning back to the stranger in black, I manage ask “Who are you?” before his hand pulls a pistol from behind him and raises it above my head.

A sharp bang against my skull envelopes my mind in darkness. I'm out before I even hit the floor.


	8. Chapter 8

**JON**

I don't know how long I've been cleaning, or even why. All I know is that I couldn't leave the farm house knowing that it hadn't been thoroughly scrubbed of any and all traces that I – or Ramsay, Theon, and the kid for that matter – were ever there, and once I began, the sound of cleaner sprays and scratchy sponges lulled me into a trance that made everything else fade into the background. Even Daenerys, but maybe that is the point. Maybe if I take too long, she'll leave without me and then she can go to the warm place and meet someone who looks good in the sun and answers her questions with more than a nod. She'll be happier without me, and I would feel whatever kind of happiness is still possible for me knowing that I am here, making sure no one finds the bodies of her victims.

Eventually, though, I finish cleaning and I'm faced with the realization that I've wasted too much time. Daenerys has most certainly left without me. My throat reverberates as I moan into my sweating palms. Before the tears prickling under my eyelids could surface, though, the silence is interrupted by the rumble of a car engine.

My head snaps toward the front door, my first thought being: Police. My second thought being: Ramsay. I pull my mask back on and step out onto the front porch to face the music. 

A silver, four-door sedan pulls up behind my van. It looks like one of the cars that was parked in front of Daenerys's house, but it can't be Daenerys. She knew nothing of the farm house. It certainly doesn't look like a cop car, but that doesn't mean a cop isn't driving it. I find out in a matter of seconds that the driver is neither Daenerys, a cop, or even Ramsay. 

“Jon!” Gendry calls out to me, standing with a hand on the opened driver's side door of the sedan. “Shit, am I glad to see you, man. I wasn't sure if you'd still be here. We need you.”

My feet stay planted on the porch. Why would Ramsay send the kid to get me to come back? 

“Come on, Jon. We're in kind of a time crunch here. We've gotta be gone tonight. It's just one quick job. You don't even have to come back with us if you don't want to. At least, that's what Ramsay told me to tell you, but to be honest, he's been pretty pissed about you not coming with us. I guess he misses you, which is kind of sweet, even if it's Ramsay.”

A job? Another job on this small island? 

Coming down from the porch, I am shaking my head. All of my things are in the back of the van and all I need to do is get to Daenerys and see if she's still there, waiting for me. Then I can be rid of all of this. No more jobs. No more death.

“Aw, come on, man,” Gendry tries and I come to a sudden halt before I pass him.

It isn't because of his halfhearted plea, but because of something I smell now that I am just a couple of feet from him. It's familiar, but too faint to be sure. Quickly, I pull off my mask and step closer to Gendry until I'm inches from him. His eyes bulge and his shoulders tense with discomfort, but I don't care about that. I care about the scent that fills my nose. It isn't coming from him, though. It's coming from the car. It smells like Daenerys. 

I shove Gendry aside and slide into the car, leaning over the console and pulling open the glove compartment. I rummage through the loose CDs, pens, and five dollar bills until I find the vehicle registration. My eyes scan the form until I see words that make my blood boil. Last Name: Targaryen. First Name: Daenerys.

“Jon --” Gendry begins meekly, but before any other word leaves his mouth, I pull the door shut, shift into “Drive” and turn the little car around until I am speeding down the dirt driveway the way the kid had come.

* * * * *

**DAENERYS**

Cold water splashing against my face jolts me back into consciousness, but my eyes snap open before the water can stop splashing and trying to gauge where I am is like trying to find something at the bottom of a pool without goggles. The turning of the faucet tells me I'm not alone. I blink fast and shake my head back and forth until I can finally make out the white ceiling above me, the big window to the right of me, and the porcelain basin that surrounds me. I'm in the master bathroom. I'm lying in the bathtub. I try to move, but my legs are bound by something tight, as are my wrists. 

“Hello, Daenerys,” a quiet, sinister voice says. The sort of voice that one would associate with an evil demon living under the bed. 

I cannot see the owner of this voice and my restraints make it near impossible to lean upward. When I try, I fall immediately back down to the bottom of the tub, smacking the back of my head against the drain. The pain is something I've never felt before, like jamming thick needles into my brain.

“That's how you pronounce it, right?” the voice asks, and I hear his sticky shoes against the tile floor until his figure appears in my sight. The light is dim, but not dim enough to hide the eeriness of his countenance. Thin lips sneering. Square jaw tightening. Ice blue eyes digging into me. His hair is black and short, but his cleanly shaven face is as ghostly as his voice.

“Dan – air – es,” he says. “Dan – air – es. What a stupid name. But, I suppose naming a girl Daenerys isn't quite as ridiculous as naming a guy Viserys.” The sinister man swings a leg over the lip of the tub to sit on the edge. I turn my legs to avoid being stomped on by his boot. “Where's your brother, Daenerys?” 

As the tears start to come, I sniffle and realize I smell blood. Detective Naharis hadn't been hyperbolic. There really were people after Viserys, and now they were here with me. 

“I don't know,” I croak out. 

He clicks his tongue three times and shakes his head. “You're lying to me now.”

“I swear. I haven't seen him in a year. The last I heard he was in California.”

He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees and stares his ice cold eyes into me. “Now, we just met, and you don't know me very well yet, so I'm going to give you one free pass for thinking I'm a complete moron, because only a complete moron would believe that you haven't seen Viserys Targaryen in a year, when his rental car is parked right in front of this house. But, if you lie to me again, you will get to know me very well, Daenerys. You'll get to know all of my likes” – his eyes trail down and up my body slowly – “and my dislikes. You'll even get to know my best friend.” He brandishes his gun, resting it on his leg. “And when he's done with you, I'll let you meet my brother, although I suppose that will be a rather dull introduction, since you'll be dead. But that's alright. I think he'll prefer you that way. I love him, but he's kind of a freak.”

Hoping this is all just a sick nightmare, I squeeze my eyes shut, but when I open them again, all I see is this vile man with his black clothes, black gun, and black soul. 

“He's gone,” I say.

“Where?”

“I don't know,” I cry, choking on a sob.

“Oh, Daenerys,” he sighs, then looks straight ahead, at something behind me, out of my vision. “Do it,” he instructs. 

“Wait!”

Before I can say anything else – before I can even think of what I could say next – a decorative hand towel is stretched over my face so firmly I think my nose might break, and then I hear the turning of the faucet again.

Where before it felt like trying to see underwater, now it feels like trying to breathe underwater. My nasal passage fills with water. My throat fills with water. I choke on it until I feel it swim into my lungs. It seeps into my eyes and it burns. My body thrashes against the sides of the tub, but the force of the hand towel over my face keeps my head firmly in place beneath the heavy stream. Just as I think I'll never breathe air again, the faucet turns again, stopping the water, and the wet hand towel leaves my face, allowing me to gag and cough and spit up the water threatening my life. 

“Where is your brother?” he asks again, but I'm not looking at him anymore. I don't even open my eyes. Wherever my brother is, I'm certain I'll find out soon enough.

“It doesn't matter,” I answer. “You're going to kill me whether I tell you or not. Homicide one-o-one. Once the victim sees your face, you have no choice but to kill them.”

He snickers quietly. “You'll be begging me to kill you before the night is through if you don't tell me what I want to know. Why not just save yourself the pain?”

Where is Jon? Will he come save me? He loves me, doesn't he? He'll save me if he loves me. But he's never killed anyone before. He can hardly even touch another person, so how is he supposed to protect me from this evil man? Maybe he's already dead. In that case, maybe I should just confess what happened to my brother so at least I could spend the rest of eternity in hell with Jon, if not the rest of our lives in Bermuda.

“Do it again,” the slimy voice orders and a second later, the faucet turns, the hand towel stretches and I am drowning once more.

“He's dead!” I announce as soon as the second round of torture ends and I've expelled the water in my lungs onto my chest. “My brother is dead!”

“See, there you go again treating me like I'm a moron. I'm starting to get offended here. Don't you think I would know if one of my targets was already dead?”

“Apparently not, because he is dead. If that makes you a moron, then that's your problem.”

His eyes squint and his lips snarl. I've pushed him too far, but what does it matter anyway? Maybe he'll get mad enough to kill me quickly. 

“If he's dead, then no one knows about it except you.”

“That's probably because I killed him.”

This triggers another fit of snickers from him and he shares a look with the person behind me. “You killed him, huh? So, tell me then. . . How did you kill him?”

I cough up a bit more water, then glower up at him with as much confidence as one can while lying tied up in a bathtub. “Well, first I killed his stupid girlfriend. Stabbed her right through the chest. Then I woke my brother up and did the same to him. Right here in this house.”

After a moments hesitation, he asks “Why?”

“Someone like you should be able to look at someone like me and know why.”

He leans back, eyebrows furrowing and head shaking slowly. “You're a twisted bitch.”

“That's the gist of it.”

“Okay then. . . if you did kill him, give me proof. Where is his body?”

My confidence falters, eyes looking away to contemplate the question. “I don't know.”

“You don't know?” He's leaning forward again, thinking he's caught me in a lie.

“I may have had help with that part.”

His tongue clicks again, but it's ponderous this time. He sends another look to the person behind me. “Daenerys. . . when you first saw me standing in the living room, you acted like you knew me. Who did you think I was?”

“My boyfriend. He's going to be here any minute, and then you're going to suffer.”

This makes him laugh. Not a snicker, but a real laugh like I'd told the funniest joke he'd ever heard. “So this – uh – boyfriend. . . He's going to kill me?”

“No,” I sneer. “He's going to hold you down and I'm going to kill you.”

At that, his laughter ceases and his smile downturns. His piercing glare inches closer to me as he leans down. I try to keep my composure, but he's so close to me now. So close I think he's about to kiss me, or maybe eat me, but his mouth bypasses mine in favor of my ear. 

His whisper is even more menacing than his speaking voice as he says “I was going to let my friend here take care of you, but now I think I'd like to have Jon watch me fuck you first.”

My eyes widen as fingers clench my neck, squeezing so hard my vision starts to fade. 

“You think you can take my brother away from me?” he snarls viciously against my face. “I will split you in fucking two. I will cut you open, decorate the room with your guts, and then make Jon clean you all up for me.” He pulls me up by the throat just to thrust my head back down against the bottom of the tub. “He will never choose you over me!”

His grip releases me and I take sharp gasps to regain control of my mind. I cough so hard I think my stomach might come up my throat. As soon as I am able to speak, I use my scratchy voice to decree “Looks like he already has!”

The disturbed man is standing now, the metal of his gun rattling in his hand by his side. His ghostly face is now red, his lips puckered tight, eyes small slits staring at the someone behind me. 

“What should I do?” the someone asks, his voice muffled – probably wearing a mask like the one Jon wears.

“I don't give a shit,” Jon's brother spits. “Just. . . make sure she doesn't die yet.” And then his shoes are making sticky noises across the tile until I don't feel him in the room anymore. 

The faucet twists on again.

* * * * *

**JON**

It's the first time I ever use the front door, and it feels right as I barge in. Like I am barging into my own home, because in a way, this is my home. Anywhere Daenerys is is my home. I feel her as soon as I'm in the foyer. I feel that she's still alive. The first sound I hear comes from the kitchen. A gun rests on the island counter top.

Ramsay is digging through the refrigerator, but stands up as soon he catches sight of me.

“Jesus, I forgot how fucking ugly you are,” he says in the sort of expressionless monotone he uses when he's displeased with something I've done. For the first time, though, I am pleased that I have displeased him and feel a guttural urge to do it again.

It takes less than a second for Ramsay's gun to be in my hand. Another second to have him pinned against the wall and I'm digging that gun into his forehead.

“You going to shoot me?” he asks loudly, his eyes turning wild with anger. “You don't have the fucking balls!”

I want so badly to pull the trigger, but before I can make up my mind, Ramsay's hands shove my shoulders back and I lose the grip on the gun. It tumbles down to the floor and Ramsay is quick to swoop down for it, but I'm quicker to grab him by the front of his jacket and slam him back against the wall. Jaw clenched like my hands around black denim, I don't even recognize the person I have turned into when I say, slow and clear “Where. . . is she?”

“So that's what you've been doing here? You're cleaning up after some psycho bitch now? She's fucking using you, Jon. She killed her own brother, for fuck's sake. Did you like that? You want to see me dead, too? What sort of sick freak would kill their own brother?”

“You're. . . not. . . my. . . brother.”

Just then my ears catch the faint sound of a commotion on the opposite end of the house, where the master bedroom is. 

* * * * *

**DAENERYS**

It's hard to come up with a plan when you feel like you've inhaled a swimming pool. The faucet turns, the water flows, the hand towel stretches, and then it all stops just long enough for the water to come back up my throat. Then is starts all over again. Rinse. Repeat.

All I know is that the person doing this to me is behind me, behind the water faucet that is directly above my head. My wrists are tied, but they are in front of me. In this position there is really only one option I have, because enduring this torture any longer is not an option at all. 

As soon as I've coughed up the latest water sampling and I hear the faucet turn again, I swing my arms up, hoping that I am not about to snap my wrists by colliding them into the faucet. Luckily, when I throw them back as far as they will go, my hands are met with something that feels less like a bathtub fixture and more like a person and the first thing I do is clutch the fabric surrounding this person and yank it forward. The hand towel still over my eyes blocks me from seeing what I'm doing, but what I hear next is a sharp thud of body against fixture and a sudden, harrowing wail. 

I quickly release the man and flip as best I can onto my front so that I can lift myself up. The wet hand towel drops from my face to the bottom of the tub and I see that my torturer is on his hands and knees on the bathroom floor, groaning and whining and clutching at his chest. I roll out of the bathtub, but before I can inch worm my way to the door, hands grip my ankles, yanking me across the floor on my stomach. Rolling over swiftly, I manage to pull my feet from his grasp and clock him under the chin with the toes of my boots.

Even with the seconds I gained causing the man to fall backward, there is no way that I can get myself away from him all tied up like this. As soon as he's on his feet beside me, ripping his mask from his face to reveal disheveled blonde hair, crooked teeth, and a deranged look in his eyes, I know I've lost. 

He swings his foot and collides his shoe into my stomach, once, then twice, then three times, while sneering “You fucking cunt! You fucking CUNT!” And just as he spits the second “cunt” at me, and just as he is swinging his foot back to give me another kick to the gut, the room reverberates with a loud BANG. 

Time seems to stop. One second stretches into infinity where I am sure that I'm the one whose been shot. There is a stabbing pain in my head, in my chest, in my gut. Everything hurts. It must have been me. But then, what feels like centuries later, the crazed blonde man collapses onto his hands and knees once more and I can see thin dribbles of blood falling from the center of his sweater to the floor. My ears are ringing from the gun shot and the pain, but I can still hear the man's soft whimpers. I can also hear the rattling of the weapon in someone's hand behind me. I turn my head and through my tears, I see Jon in the doorway. His arm is frozen in front of him, still pointing the gun at the man slowly dying in the corner. His expression is that of shock, like he had been sleepwalking and woke up just as the shot when off. And then his eyes meet mine. 

“Jon,” I call out to him quietly, my voice sore and hoarse.

His lips part like he's going to say something to me – 

CRASH. 

Chunks of porcelain and shards of glass erupt from behind Jon's head before he topples to the floor. And then, standing in the doorway, is Jon's brother, what's left of my shattered bedside lamp in his hand. I gasp, looking to Jon for any sign that he's okay, but before I can make out any movements, I am being pulled by my hair across the room and no amount of squirming and twisting my head gets him to let go. Once in the master bedroom, he pulls so hard on my hair that I am lifted almost to my feet, and then pushed onto my stomach on the bed, my bound hands underneath me. 

“Jon!” I cry out, because I don't know what else to do. I shout his name over and over into my down comforter as I feel his brother climb on top of me. 

“Don't worry. He'll be fine,” he says wickedly, close to my ear. I feel his sticky hands slide under my damp shirt, pushing it further and further up my body until they curve underneath me and grip my bare breasts. “He'll wake up soon and when he sees what a fucking lying, manipulative, little slut you are, he'll come to his senses. And after I kill you, he'll come home with me where he belongs.”

I should know better than to keep talking back, but my tongue has a mind of it's own when I tauntingly reply through gritted teeth “You sound like you're in love with him.”

For a moment I think I've succeeded in diverting his attention because his hands leave my chest, but then I feel them on my hips, tugging at the fabric of my pants. 

“Wait, wait, wait!” I say urgently, my heart starting to pound hard inside my chest. “No, no, no! Stop! Please!”

“Please?” He snickers. “Guess I've found out how to get you to be nice to me.”

With whatever stamina I have left, I wiggle and trash but he has my legs pinned between his knees. In one swift, forceful motion, he tugs my pants and underwear down past my thighs and I feel air on my butt. One of his hands presses down on the back of my throbbing skull until I'm screaming straight into the mattress. I can only assume what he'll do with his other hand. But before anything else can happen, I hear a voice speak. A new voice. For a second I wonder if Jon has broken his silence, but this voice is too clueless to be Jon's, too unaware. 

“What the hell are you doing?” the voice asks. 

I scream louder just in case this person is the kind who would help someone like me. 

“Get the fuck out of here!” demands the disgusting man on top of me. 

“Ramsay, you can't --”

BANG. 

The ringing in my ears makes me loose all sense of self and time. I've forgotten how to move or breathe. For the longest time I think I'm already dead. This time, for sure. This time, it is I who is shot. And this, this is death. 

* * * * *

**JON**

A cold hand grazes the side of my face, fingers floating across my skin like water, sticky and wet and smelling of metal. When I finally will my eyes to open, I discover the hand caressing my cheek is no hand at all. It is blood I am feeling, a pool of it expanding slowly underneath my head. Am I dead? I lift up my head just enough to follow the stream of red and find that it's coming from the lifeless form of Theon Greyjoy.

BANG. 

Like an electric shock right to the spine, my body seizes at the sudden noise. The gun shot echoes in my ears, but I force my limbs to push me up off this bloody bathroom floor and carry me out to the bedroom, following the hazy form of Ramsay crouched in the center of the bed, arm erected out toward his side before he reaches forward and sets something on the nightstand. I look to where his arm had been pointing and see another lifeless form lying in the threshold between the hallway and the bedroom. I want to believe it isn't the kid, but I know it is, because who else could it be. Ramsay killed Gendry. 

Turning back to the man who was once my protector, my expression turns quickly from anger to rage as I see Daenerys on her stomach beneath him. She isn't moving, but I know she isn't dead. Ramsay's hands are on her. He even took off his gloves. He's trying to make her his, like a black hole trying to swallow up the sun, but he can't swallow her like he did to all those strange women who would come in and out of our old apartment, because I'm not going to hide in the bathroom this time. 

Before he can finish unbuttoning his jeans, I jump toward him and grab him by the jacket, yanking him with all of my strength until he's flying off the bed and onto the wood floor with a loud thud. But I don't hear the thud. I don't hear anything. Not the words he says to me, or the noises he makes when he can't form real words anymore, or the sound of the bones in his face breaking. I don't even see anything. Not the look of terror in his eyes or the blood spattering across the floor and up at myself with every punch. I don't even realize what I'm doing until my fist smashes down for the twentieth time and collides with something smooth and gelatinous.

Finally, my eyes focus on what lies below me. Sweat and tears trickle like rain from my face and hit a mess of skin and teeth and blood and brains. I've seen death more times than I can count – Ramsay's executions, Theon's drownings and stranglings, the kid's simple bludgeonings, and Daenerys's stabbings – but never in my life have I seen anything as gruesome as what I have just done to a man I once called “brother” while lying in a hospital bed with over seventy stitches holding the skin of my body and face together. 

“You stick with me from now on. No one will fuck with you again. Anyone touches you again, I'll kill them,” he had told me with a look in his eyes that assured me he had meant it. No one had ever wanted me like Ramsay had. Not even my dad.

My stomach turns and I cover my mouth with my right hand, but the pain of my aching knuckles makes me gasp and moan. I push away from this ugly sight and curl into myself while I cry. “Mommy,” I almost whimper. Even though I can't even remember what she looked like or felt like, I think that the last time I was ever truly happy was when I was lying in her arms. Just me and her. Maybe she even sang to me. Don't talk, put your head on my shoulder.

“Baby,” she would have called me, because she hadn't thought of a name for me yet. Jon came later, from my dad, after she had died. 

“It's okay, baby,” she would have said to me, because coming into this world is a scary thing for babies, and for adults. 

“I'm sorry, baby.”

I'm sorry too. 

“I love you.”

I don't know how long I spend with my forehead pressed against Daenerys's chest, her arms holding me tight and her sweet voice whispering things to me that make me think of my mother, but when I finally stop crying and lift my head the room has turned a foggy blue with the first signs of morning coming in through the window. 

Like another electric shock, I realize that the sun is coming up and there are three dead bodies in this house that need to be hauled to the farm house and buried. There's blood seeping all over floors that must be scrubbed and bleached. 

“Jon,” says Daenerys as I jump to my feet. She stands too, having to catch me when I almost topple over from dizziness and exhaustion. “It's okay, baby. I'm going to help you.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took a little longer to update than I wanted, but ending this story proved to be quite a challenge. I wrote a completely different ending, then decided the original ending was better, then wrote another completely different ending, then decided the original was still better. While I'm a little mad at myself for spending so much time writing all those endings just to scrap them, it got me to a place where I can honestly say that what you're about to read is as close to being the "right" ending for this story as I could come up with, and I'm really happy with how this has all turned out. So here it is! Thank you all of you for reading this strange story and being so supportive. I love you all!

**DAENERYS**

After an hour of exerting way too much energy than I should in this state, all three bodies are in the back of the white van parked in front of the house, demolishing my newly salvaged flower bed. We used the linens I was going to cover the furniture with to mop up all of the blood – and there was so much blood. I used to dream of wading in pools of blood, smelling it, tasting it, bathing in it. Good dreams. But the condition of these rooms was no fantasy come true. I didn't care that people had died. Especially those people. But I cared that Jon cared. I thought that I could be good for him – that we could be good for each other. No more death. And now he's scrubbing his brother's brain matter out of an area rug in the master bedroom.

I took care of the bathroom, keeping one hand over my nose and mouth as the other wiped the tiled floor with bleach. 

It's past six o'clock when I finish and I see out the window that the sun is almost half way above the treeline. I turn around and for the first time that morning, I get a good look at myself in the large rectangular mirror situated above the double vanity. 

Though my shirt is almost dry now, the mix of water and blood that stained it not too long ago makes it look like I'm wearing a minimalist water color painting. The red speckles continue up my neck and streaks of it are crusted in my tangled hair. I'd managed to pull my slender hands free of my bindings quickly after Ramsay – that's his name, right? – was taken care of and now my wrists are bloodied too, raw and stinging. I'm a wreck. A zombie. But it's nothing compared to how Jon looks. 

He doesn't let me get a good look at him until we're in the woods behind an old abandoned cottage in the middle of the island. Even without his mask, Jon has a way of projecting this energy that lets me know he doesn't want me to look at him, so I don't, and it makes me start to cry a few times as we dig a large enough pit to drop all three bodies into, along with the bloodied sheets and the broken lamp and the gun. I'm afraid. Afraid that he hates me now as much as I hate myself. Afraid that he's broken now, even more so than before, and that it's my fault.

When it's time to fill in the pit, I don't bother with the shovel. I'm tired and hurt and sad and I just want everything and everyone on the planet to fuck off so Jon and I can live in peace. I get on my knees and push the pile of earth until everything in the grave is covered. 

“Are you okay?” I ask Jon finally, looking up at him with my bloodshot eyes. 

His head tilts down to me, but his eyes are someplace beside me. Red like mine. The entire right side of his face is caked with blood and if his clothes weren't black, I'm sure I'd see spatters of red all over him. There's no way to describe his right hand except to say it looks like he punched a man to death. If he hadn't been able to successfully use the shovel, I would assume it's broken. He looks like someone who should be in a great deal of pain, but somehow can't feel anything at all.

For a long minute I wait for a nod or shake of his head, but then his lips eventually part and I hear him utter ever so quietly “I. . . don't know.”

My bottom lips quivers with signs of fresh tears in my eyes. “You saved my life, Jon. Even though I didn't deserve it.”

Slowly, his head shakes. “You. . . saved me.”

I wipe the tears from my cheeks which I'm sure only serves to smear more dirt onto my face, then I pick myself up onto my feet. 

“Let's go inside. Does the water work?”

His head nods. 

“Good. Come on. We look like the walking dead.”

* * * * *

**JON**

In the weeks I'd been staying in this dilapidated house, I never thought Daenerys would ever stand within it's wall, but here she is, following me through the cold shack. I show her the grimy bathroom and watch her flip the light switch. It doesn't work, but there is a small cracked window that lets in enough sunlight to see around the room. 

The glass panel shower door pops open when she pulls and then she's turning on the low-pressure water that never gets warm. Without hesitation, she pulls her t-shirt up over her head and drops it to the floor. When her white bra follows, I turn my back to her but my feet keep me in the doorway while I listen to her remove the rest of her clothes. 

“Jon, it's okay” she says quietly.

After a deep breath, I turn. It's one thing to watch someone in the shadows, wearing a mask. Now I look upon her in the dim morning light with nothing obstructing my view. My mind wanders once again to the red headed woman Ramsay brought home for me one night. I suppose she was beautiful, but I never really knew what beautiful was until Daenerys, because no one seemed right until her. Everything about Daenerys is right. The length of her limbs, the width of her shoulders and hips, the curves of her breasts.

Her hand outstretches toward me. “Come here.”

I look away, leaning my forehead against the door jam, my fingers fiddling with the chipping paint on the wall. I don't want her to be mad at me, but I can't come with her if it means that I must take off my clothes as well. I'm not right like her.

When the shower door pops again, I look back and see that she's gone ahead without me. Through the glass I can still see her hazy silhouette, pale and wiggling about most likely from the chill of the water. I look down at my battered hand. Not afraid to kill for her, but too afraid to let her see my scars. 

Slowly, and with my back turned away from her just in case, I undress, removing every bloody, sweaty, smelly piece of clothing I have been treating as a safety blanket. I pop the shower door open and when Daenerys turns to me, I expect her to stare at my too short, too thin, too mutilated body as I had at her perfect one, but as soon as she sees I'm there, she tugs me into the stall and pulls me against her, wrapping her arms tight around me and pressing her cheek to my shoulder. 

I stand frozen for some time in disbelief that I am flesh-to-flesh with another person, but with Daenerys's fiery skin and the shower's cold spray, it isn't so unbearable. And when I bring my arms around her too, I actually feel kind of perfect. 

We stay in this way together for some time. So long that I begin to drift off, but eventually she parts from me a mere inch to find the lonely bar of soap in the scummy tray. 

“Close your eyes,” she says while lathering the bar into her hands. 

As soon as I comply, I feel her soapy palm on the side of my face, gently scrubbing away Theon's blood. After a minute of this, I hear the soap bar return to the dish, then her wet hand caresses all the suds from my skin. Her lips press to mine, soft and slow, and I don't open my eyes until her arms are back around me, her cheek resting against me once more. 

* * * * *

**DAENERYS**

Back at school, which seems like a million years ago, my deceased roommate used to patronizingly call me “Your Highness” or “Your Majesty.” When she was in a particularly bad mood it was “Princess.” She didn't like being my roommate. She told me as much the first day I transferred into our dorm. No one liked being my roommate, which was why I had transferred so many times – three in total in just my sophomore year. It wasn't that they hated me – even when they called me names and rolled their eyes without the decency of turning away first, I knew it was really my father that they hated. While Aerys Targaryen has never been a politician, his business dealings often overflow into the political realm, much to the dismay of the young idealists I went to school with. While such passive aggressiveness certainly isn't cause for one's death, I suppose that was why I killed Missandei. Perhaps in my subconscious mind, I thought that if she died, so too would the stigma I carried my whole life just for being Aerys Targaryen's daughter. But the truth is that I killed her to know what it would feel like, and because I didn't want to have to transfer rooms again. 

Either way, I wonder what she and all the others who taunted me would think if they'd seen what all I'd done in the last twelve hours. I am no princess. No princess at all.

Detective Naharis doesn't believe me when I call and tell him a lie about why I wasn't there to meet him at the ferry landing. He doesn't say so, but I can hear it in his voice. He doesn't believe that the masked team of assassins let me live after interrogating me on the whereabouts of my brother. 

“I'm going to come to you so we can discuss this in person,” he tells me. 

“No. You need to find Viserys, if they haven't found him already. I told them he was at a party on the mainland, but I'm not even sure if that was true. Viserys never told me where he was going. I'll meet you at the landing tomorrow morning, same time.”

“You're not safe there by yourself.”

“I'm safer than Viserys is right now. Find him.”

It doesn't matter that he doesn't believe me, as long as there is enough doubt in his mind to heed my advise and begin a search for my brother. 

After I hang up, I leave my phone atop a dusty dresser and pad to the bed on bare feet. Wrapped in a moth-chewed quilt, I lie down beside Jon, wrapped in a blanket of his own. We're facing each other, letting our wet hair soak the pillow below us. 

“I think I bought us another day, but we have to leave tonight,” I say softly. 

He doesn't respond except to stare his dark eyes into mine. 

“I'm so tired, but I'm afraid to fall asleep. I don't know if I have a concussion or not and if I do – I don't think you're supposed to go to sleep if you have a concussion.”

He still does not respond and I wonder if Jon has already given me all the words he ever will. The blanket draped loosely around his frame exposes enough of his chest that I can see the beginnings of the scars that mark his torso. I bring my hand to them, gingerly grazing the discolored skin.

“I'm also afraid. . . that I'm a monster.” My quivering lip draws moisture to my eyes. “I killed people when I didn't have to, and then I made you feel like you had to kill people to save me when I'm not worth saving. I don't know what to say except that you're the only person in the world that I care about. I need you to believe that. I need you to believe that. . . even though I've hurt people, I'll never hurt you.”

“Don't. . . talk.” His low, hushed voice startles me.

“I'm sorry.”

As tears slip across my face to dribble on the pillow, I feel Jon's finger tips touch my lips. 

He repeats “Don't talk.”

And then he leans forward to replace his fingers with his mouth. His short beard tickles my nose and I forget all about how beards used to repulse me. Now I realize it was just the mediocre men behind the beards that seemed so bad. The men that thought it was their God given right to touch me. Only Jon can touch me now, because I gave him the right. I want so badly to touch him too, but as he kisses me, he holds my hand against his chest. 

I free my other hand by pushing him gently onto his back and snaking a leg across his waist until I'm perched on top of him. Our mouths never separate, and as I bring my hand to his cheek I carefully slide my tongue through his parted lips. Part of me thinks I may spook him and end up with my tongue severed in half by his teeth, but I'm willing to take the risk and to my delight I am met with the widening of his mouth and the slick softness of his tongue against mine. 

It isn't until I'm so aroused that my hips start to rock against him on their own accord that I realize our blankets have drifted enough from our bodies that nothing separates my skin from his. Quickly thereafter, I feel something grazing my inner thigh, twitching and growing larger in size. Just a couple weeks ago, I had never known arousal like what I felt looking upon the Valyrian steel dagger for the first time, but now, feeling Jon's erection pulse between my legs, I would toss that hunk of metal into the sea and forget its very existence just to feel Jon inside of me. 

Don't talk, he'd said. So I don't. I just kiss him, taste him and touch him and glide my wet pussy across his manhood.

Finally, he lets go of my hand atop his chest and brings them tentatively to my hips. I take it as a sign to proceed and reach my now-free hand down between us. Just as Jon is moaning softly into my mouth, I find his cock with my fingers and press it too my hungry entrance. He squirms a bit, fingers digging into my hips and emitting another type of moan into my mouth that sounds a bit like worry, but when I part from our lip lock, the head of his cock is already nestled inside my pussy, stretching it's virgin walls. 

Staying still, I remove my hands from him and plant them on either side of his shoulders to hold myself above him. I gaze down at him, waiting for him to tell me it's too much, but no such words leave his mouth. Not even the shake of his head. Just a look of incredulous concern. So I lower myself down and down and down, stretching and swallowing him up. I grit my teeth and whimper a bit at the pain, but it isn't so much the hurt that has me shaking, it's the newness. It's the feeling like everything is changing now. The feeling that I was wrong about myself for such a long time, thinking that I could never fall in love. Surely people like me could never really love someone. And yet here I am. Me and Jon. 

When I can't go down anymore, I go up a little bit and then down again, which stretches me even more. Jon winces too, but I think for a different reason and after the fourth time of going up a little and then down again, he's groaning deeply and squeezing my hips to keep me down. My heart is beating a million times a minute and even though it isn't an orgasm I'm feeling, my toes curl nonetheless as I feel the newness of warm fluid filling me up inside, radiating heat throughout my body. 

As we breathe heavily, staring deeply into each others eyes, my throat longs to speak, to tell him it was my first time too, but then I remember 'Don't talk,' so I simply relax my body on top of him, my tits pressed against his chest and my head nestled under his chin. I feel a blanket envelope our lower halves and then Jon's palms slide up the length of my back. I smile and in mere seconds I feel a soft wave pull me into a deep slumber, Jon's heartbeat thumping like a metronome against my ear.

By this time tomorrow we'll be on a plane headed somewhere new, somewhere neither of us ever thought we'd end up. How long it will take for someone to find us, I do not know. Even if I dye my hair and change my name, eventually someone will find us. But for now, I forget about tomorrow and I sleep in my shadow's arms, dreaming not of blood, but of love.

* * * * *

**JON**

We sleep into the early evening, waking in a tangle as the sun is beginning it's daily descent. I'd been awake for a short while before Daenerys stirs, but I enjoy watching her sleep from such a close view. Her lips parted slightly, eyelashes flickering while she dreams, chest rising and falling slowly with each breath. When her eyes finally open, the first thing she does is smile at me.

Dressing in somewhat clean clothes, I shove the filthy ones from last night into one of my duffel bags while Daenerys grudgingly adorns hers. 

“We need to get to the boat quick so I can change into something that doesn't make me look like a homeless junkie,” she says, sitting down on the floor to tug on her boots. 

I shake my head. “You are. . . beautiful.”

Eyes flickering up to me, her cheeks glow a soft pink as she smiles that sweet smile once more. “I like hearing your voice. I could get used to it.”

When her boots are finally situated, I hold my hand out for her. She slides her hand into mine and lets me pull her onto her feet. 

With her hand staying put in mine, she looks up at me and says “I could get used to this, too.”

Our mouths meet. Gentle kisses, lips and tongues. 

“I love you,” she whispers. 

This time, I'm the one to smile. “I. . . love you.”

She kisses me again, firmer this time, wetter and hotter. I close my eyes and all I hear are the sounds of our mouths moving together. I'm enraptured by it. Hypnotized. Maybe that's why I don't hear the car engine rumbling up to the house outside. Maybe I just don't want to hear it. However, the sound of the car door slamming shut brings me out of my daze. I separate from Daenerys, but before my lustful mind can comprehend anything other than her, the front door is being pushed open. 

Spinning around, I focus my eyes on the figures of two men, tall, slender and middle aged. One of them has a gray beard and bushy, expressive eyebrows that remind me of the man from the boat docks. The friend of Roose. That must be him, because the man standing beside him I recognized immediately as Roose Bolton, my old employer. 

“Jon?” Roose's deep, stoic voice asked. “Is that you? My, it's been a while since I've seen your face.” 

He wanders in like he's touring a museum, hands behind his back. His friend remains at the door, silent. 

“The boys were expected at the docks early this morning, but never showed. Would you happen to know anything about that?” Roose crooks his neck and squints his eyes at something behind me. “Who is this, then? A friend of yours?”

I cast a quick look to Daenerys before bowing my head bashfully, unsure of what to do or what to say when I don't think I'll be able to say anything at all.

“I'm Daenerys Targaryen” she answers and my jaw clenches as sweat forms all up my back because I know that this isn't good, I just don't know what's going to happen from it. 

“Well that's certainly an interesting name.”

“Your boys, as you call them, came to my home to kill my brother.”

“Oh? Is that so?” Roose finds a rickety wooden chair and sits down upon it. “Well, please tell me, were they successful?” 

“No.”

“I see. I suppose they won't be getting paid then.”

“No, I suppose they won't, seeing as how they're dead.”

My eyes spring up to Daenerys, wide and wondering why she would say such a thing to a man like Roose. She's stepped out from behind me and toward the man, planting her arms across her chest in a look of statuesque defiance. 

“Dead?” Roose appeared more amused than upset, but there is a slight, yet tell-tale, falter in his straight-backed composure that sends off alarm bells in my head. “And how did that happen, I wonder?”

“Well, I killed them.”

My chest heaved, each breath becoming harder and harder to take in. It was making me lightheaded, unable to focus on Roose's facial expression when he looks at me and asks “Is this true, Jon?”

What am I to do? I can't speak, but what would I say anyway? Do I shake my head because no, it isn't true? That would make Daenerys look like a liar, and if Daenerys thinks the right thing to do is to tell Roose she killed them, then maybe she has a plan and wants me to trust her. I don't want her to think I don't trust her. But if I nod, I'll be lying to Roose, and I don't know if I can do that either. 

After a minute, Roose seems to take my anxious silence as an affirmative. “I see,” he says introspectively. “And how exactly did you kill them?”

Daenerys replies “What's the best way to kill a man? With his own stupidity.” 

At this, Roose lets out a chuckle, nodding his head up at down with a look I would best characterize as approval. “I like you, Daenerys Targaryen.”

“I like me, too, Random Creepy Man.”

“My name is Roose Bolton. On paper, I'm a crisis consultant, which isn't a complete lie. I do aid my clients with their legal, financial, and personal troubles, but my method of aid is very cut and dry. Locate the enemy. Kill the enemy. That sort of thing.” 

“So you're a hit man.”

“More like a procurer of hit men.”

“A pimp then.”

Again Roose chuckles. “Yes, I suppose. Is that something you'd be interested in?”

“Being a pimp?”

“Being a hit man. Hit. . . woman. You're a killer, Daenerys. Not simply because you've killed before, but because it's who you are. I can see it in your eyes. It's been with you your entire life, hasn't it? How did it start? Hold your pet hamster underwater until it drowned?”

There was a short silence and I watch as Daenerys dropps her arms to her sides. My gut is turning, wanting to jump between them and shield her from Roose's head games, but my feet can't move an inch. 

“Snails,” spoke Daenerys eventually. “As a child I would find snails in the garden and take them out to the street, put them down right where the asphalt was faded with tire treads and watch while a car crunched them to dust. When that got boring I would pour salt on them and watch their bodies bubble and fizz until they were just a puddle of ooze on the ground.” 

“You're an interesting girl, Daenerys. He's not a killer, you know.” He motions toward me with a nod of his head. “He couldn't hurt a fly. Or even a snail, I expect.”

“I know,” replies Daenerys. “He likes to watch, though.”

An amused smile passes Roose's face. “That he does. Nothing wrong with that.”

Daenerys takes slow steps backward and to the side until she's standing right beside me. I feel her hand take my sweaty one and hold on tight. 

“How would you like to work for me?” Roose asks.

“Killing people?”

“That's right.” Sliding his hand into the breast pocket of his jacket, Roose pulls out a small leather bound notebook. “In this book are the names of people I've been contracted to kill. Each one offers a different dollar amount. Usually the more high profile the person is, the bigger the pay day. I always get half, and my boys – or girls – split the rest evenly. Lets say a name on the list grants one-hundred grand, I get fifty and you would get fifty. You and Jon, if you want to work together.”

“My father is rich. I'm rich. I don't need money.”

“Maybe not. Maybe you just need the names. Someone to kill who probably deserves to die anyway. You'll get to do what you love most.”

Daenerys's head turns to me, eyes searching mine like she thinks the answer will be in there, but I don't have any answers. All I know is that Roose can't be trusted.

Looking back at Roose, Daenerys answers “No. I might be a killer, in the way that alcoholics are always alcoholics no matter how many chips they have, but I'm not going to kill anymore. I'm done with that. It isn't what I love most anymore.”

I feel myself smile again, feel Daenerys squeeze my hand with hers as her eyes find mine once more. The kind of blue you only find in the sky on the most beautiful of Summer days. Summer. It isn't long now til Summer comes. Daenerys would look stunning in the Summer sun.

There is no bang or a flash. Just a quick zip of air lasting only a millisecond is the warning given before Daenerys flinches and her eyes lose focus as a thin spray of red leaves the side of her head. Her hand slides from my wet grasp as she topples over like a domino, hitting the floor on her side before lulling onto her back, Summer blue eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling. 

I think my heart has stopped. Truly stopped this time. I watch her, waiting for her to get back up, to groan or blink or do anything to show me she isn't dead. 

“What a shame. I could have turned her into a real asset.” Roose's words are in the far far distance, overpowered by the high pitched ringing in my ears. I think I might be having a stroke because my body feels numb, but simultaneously like it's going to explode. When Roose's hand lands on my shoulder, I don't even flinch. “You let a little girl get into your head? When you didn't come back with the others I assumed you finally got up the nerve to kill yourself, but this is even worse.”

A thick tear escapes my eyelid, triggering a waterfall down my face as more join in. I drop to my knees and bury my face in her chest. Weeping. Fists balled in the thin fabric of her t-shirt. 

“No,” I moan. “No, no, no.” Over and over. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“Out of respect for what we've been through together, I won't put a bullet in your head too,” says Roose on his way out the door, but I can hardly hear him over my sobs. “Take care of yourself, Jon. Or don't. I guess it doesn't really matter anymore.”

I lift my head, a torrent of tears and snot staining her clothes. I take her face in my hands and swish her from side to side, but she just won't wake up. I kiss her, but she doesn't kiss me back. I hold her, but she doesn't hold me back. I tell her I love her, but she says nothing back.

Minutes upon minutes – I don't know how many – before I finally give up, releasing her from my arms and sitting back, pulling my knees to my chest. Alone again. It's getting too dark to see her now. She's fading away into the night, body going cold.

Eventually, my tear ducts run dry and my tremors subside. Daenerys. Nothing but a dead thing now. 

I stand, step over her body and the small pool of blood formed under her head like a red halo, and find the sofa. It is where her phone rests, still password protected but I can still call 9-1-1 I think. For once in my life, I can decide to trust the police and tell them everything that happened. They would take Daenerys's body and she can be buried in one of those scenic graveyards under a big tree and a headstone carved into a statue of an angel, because that's what she is – was. But, if I tell them everything, they'll know Daenerys was a murderer, and people don't like murderers. They'll say terrible things about her and that she deserved to die, but that isn't true.

No. I set the phone down.

After pressing one last kiss to Daenerys's cold, motionless mouth, I scoop her up into my arms and carry her out of the shack and toward the trees. She wouldn't want to be buried beside her brother and the rest of them, and I don't really want to be buried beside my brother either, so I walk and walk through the woods until I'm too tired to walk anymore. I lay her down at the base of a thick tree and that is where I dig my final grave, wide enough for two. 

When Daenerys is resting at the bottom of the hole, I take the shovel back to where Ramsay rests. It only takes a few minutes of digging to uncover his trusted pistol from his shallow grave. I take it back with me to Daenerys. 

It becomes clear how thoughtless this plan is when I use my hands to try to fill in this lovers' grave while lying in it as well. I manage to cover our bottom halves, but I'll need enough room to hold the gun to my temple. I will just have to trust that nature will find a way to bury us properly over time. 

Laying on my back, head turned to the side, I gaze upon Daenerys's white hair, pale skin and pink lips for the last time before disengaging the pistol's safety and bringing it to my head. 

“I'm sorry,” I tell her, and hope that wherever she is, she hears it. 

As I squeeze the trigger, I hope that wherever she is, I'll be with her soon.

Click. 

My eyebrows furrow and my eyes dart about in confusion and anger at the possibility that the gun is void of any bullets. I pop open the chamber of the gun and squint my eyes to see it's contents in the dusk light. One, two, three bullets. Enough to kill myself three times. 

I pop the chamber back in place, making sure there is a round in my next shot, and bring it to my temple once more. Closing my eyes, I count. 

One.

Two.

Three.

I open my eyes. 

Three bullets. Enough to kill myself three times, or enough to kill three people, once. 

Once Daenerys is properly buried, her grave marked with an assortment of stones in the pattern of a sun – a circle with five rays emitting from it – I hastily collect everything left at the house. My mask. My gloves. My fake passport. The keys to the boat that belongs to the man on the list. I climb into the van. From my pocket, I retrieve the drawing Daenerys had made for me, but rather than waste time staring at her golden silhouette, I flip it over. 

Using a stray pen I find in the glove box, I scribble two names onto the paper just above my own, then give my list a careful read.

_Man with the gray beard_

_Roose Bolton_

_Jon Snow_

One. 

Two. 

Three. 

**THE END**


End file.
